[TriLUG] VirtualBox?

[Roy Vestal]

I've run Windows 7 Enterprise under VirtualBox on OSX (Leopard and  
SnowLeopard), Ubuntu 9.04, Fedora 10/11, as well as Windows XP. My  
linux laptops have 2GB RAM.

To install, set the RAM to 1GB (as mentioned previously) and then  
install. Once that's complete, reset it to 512MB.

If you are using VB just to try Windows 7, it'll be fine. If you need  
to use it on a daily basis, you'll need more RAM and I've found that  
on my Mac's I've had to give it at least 1.5GB to get to run smoothly.  
The same on my VMware vSphere 4 cluster and on VMware Server.

HTH,
- Roy


On Oct 2, 2009, at 8:57 AM, Charles Fischer wrote:

> 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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>
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Roy Vestal
http://rpp.linuxmaniac.net
   .-.
   /v\    L   I   N   U   X
  // \\  >Phear the Penguin<
/(   )\
  ^^-^^
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