Increasing Size of your VirtualBox virtual disk

Today my PHP application on my linux virtual server was giving me a ton of error on simply allocating space for sessions. I couldn’t have actually ran out of space but it was worth the check.

df -h

100% of my virtual image was used and since I did not want to go to the hassle of re-doing everything again, after a bit of research, this is what I have found that helped me a ton:

VBoxManage modifyhd /path/to/the/virtual/disk/image.vdi –resize 20480

This would work perfectly, but my image wasn’t a VDI it was a VMDK which will throw you an error when you do the same process.

There is a way around it:

1st – VBoxManage clonehd /path/to/the/virtual/disk/image.vmdk /path/to/save/the/new/virtual/disk/image.vdi –format vdi
2nd – VBoxManage modifyhd /path/to/new/virtual/disk/image.vdi –resize 20480

For a 8GB Virtual Image it can take up to 20 minutes for the whole process.

Note: This was done in command line for OSX.

Emulators for mobile application

I have been working with mobile lately and one of the hardest things to do is to test your application (web or not) in a phone, even more when you don’t have a couple of hand full of real phones to test your application.

Running some search’s I have found out some good sites with emulators, from the old style into the new smart phones.

Start with A guide to mobile emulators from Mobi Forge. I has almost the full list of the mobile emulators to be download and it is only outdated in regards of the Blackberry emulators, that needs an older library of Java.

What happens is that some urls have changed and some emulators need older libraries, like the Blackberry ones. For the Blackberry, to get an older library, you will need to fill out a form and then Java will send you the link with the JDK 1.5 to be downloaded. The issue with this library is that it has been discontinued and the Blackberry Email app, necessary to see webpages, does not support this new library yet. Under Linux you can use Synaptic (or apt-get, yum, etc) to install the Java Development Kit 5.0 Update 22.

Anyway, the next step is to download the VirtualBox. Some emulators, like the Palm and the Android, are under a VirtualBox disk. This makes it easier to install and run the emulators, besides this one, most of the rest are under some SDK environment.

There are a couple of test enviroments that are available online, but those are only for testing web pages, anyway, a good resource.

• Opera Mini Emulator
• iPhone Emulator
• Sony and Nokia emulators

Also download an emulator for Openware and WML. We still have a ton of those phones around and if you are developing a webpage, then, you must use this.

I have been searching emulators for Japanese phones and so far I haven’t been able to find something really good. There is a Firefox extension, FireMobileSimulator that actually does a very good job and the only fall back is in regards the encoding. It seems to read the encoding of the machine, so, I got situations where in Japan the test was giving wrong results, but here in US everything was alright.