[TriLUG] VirtualBox?

[Charles Fischer]

Thanks for all of the feed back.  I am going to give it a try.

BTW there is one excuse for not upping the memory.  The system is an 
HP Pavilion zd8000 notebook which has a limit of 2GB.

Thanks again,
Charles Fischer


At 12:59 AM 10/2/2009, you wrote:
>At 12:04am -0400 on Fri, 02 Oct 2009, Charles Fischer wrote:
>>Has anybody used VirtualBox?  I want to run Fedora and Windows 7 on 
>>a P4 3.2GHz with 2GB memory.  Host OS will be Windows 7 and guest OS Linux.
>>Am I out of my mind, or will this work well?
>
>Frickin' love VirtualBox.  I can't speak to the Windows 7 bit, but I 
>run WinXP and many *nix distros inside VBox regularly, on an Ubuntu host.
>
>I /can/ speak to two things, however: memory and hardware virtualization.
>
>1. Memory.  You want memory.  Lots of it.  (We are now at the 
>6GB/$100 threshold, so you have little excuse.)
>
>What's the minimum for Win7?  I know that Vista does not play well 
>with anything less than a gig, 2 in any normal circumstance of which 
>I'm aware.  If Win7 is anything like Vista (and all accounts I've 
>read suggest that it is), you will want to at least half again the 
>memory you have for Win7 + virtual machines.
>
>2. VMX/SVM - hardware virtualization
>
>You may get "fast enough" performance for your needs, but you can 
>get near-native performance in the guest OS if you have hardware 
>virtualization help.  That is, if the following command returns something
>
>$ grep -Ei "vmx|svm" /proc/cpuinfo
>
>I don't believe the P4 has the virtualization bit, but my memory is 
>rusty in these matters.  (Briefly and roughly, VMX is the Intel flag 
>on the CPU for virtualization and SVM is AMD's version of it.)
>
>Of course, for administration, (if you ever need to do it, har har) 
>my suggestion is to go with *nix as a host and Win as the 
>guest.  Assuming you're facile with the command line, you'll have a 
>*much* easier time with the tools that *nix systems afford you.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Kevin
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