Setup Virtual box 4.x.x with Windows XP and iTunes for Home sharing under Ubuntu

After experiencing intermittent success with iTunes under Wine since upgrading iTunes to 10.4.1; both from the perspective of iTunes working with Wine and also with Wine/iTunes worknig with Apple TV2 (ATV2). I've decided to bite the bullet and run iTunes within a virtual instance of Windows XP running on top of Ubuntu 10.04. I've tried this on both an Intel Atom based server (without native support for virtualisation) and with an AMD Neo server (with native virtualisation support). I've had good results on both set ups using Oracles free VirtualBox and Windows XP SP3, best of all it was rather simple - here's how...

Successfully kill and restart iTunes in Wine (Ubuntu & Apple TV 2 / ATV2)

I run iTunes under Wine on my Ubuntu server to share media to an Apple TV 2 using Home sharing. Since upgrading to iTunes 10.4.1 under Wine I've had regular issues with my Apple TV 2 no longer seeing the Ubuntu based iTunes Home share after a period of time. The easy way I've found to fix this is to kill iTunes in Wine and restart it is as follow a helpful script to achieve this follows...

Share your Ubuntu media with AppleTV 2 : Ubuntu + iTunes (WINE) + ATV2

The Apple TV 2 (ATV2) seems like a good bit of kit for the price certainly better value than the iPad HDMI connection kit. I picked up an ATV2 primarily to wirelessly share my iPad stowed photos (from the Apple Camera Connection kit) on a large LCD TV. Furthermore, I was also intending to share photos and music from my home server running Ubuntu to the ATV2. Not wanting to jail break the ATV2 I was thus sad to see a lack of either native uPnP or DLNA support on the ATV2 out of the box rendering my home server useless with respect to the ATV2... the solution was to install iTunes to my home server and use Apple HomeSharing feature to get access to my server based media. Here's how to do it: