dual booting

[William Park]

> From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>
>
> On Sun, Jan 03, 2010 at 12:25:23PM -0800, William Park wrote:
> > That's next in my list.
> > 
> > I admit "virtualization" is useful for application testing.  But, it's useless for
> > hardware testing (like the wireless problem above).  And, I'm not sure about
> > its cost-effectiveness that's advertised. Netbooks/nettops are getting better
> > and cheaper by the months.
> 
> Well what kind of hardware?  serial devices, USB devices and maybe a
> few others can be tested with kvm.  I believe there is work going on to
> allow a PCI device to be handed over to a kvm virtual machine as well
> (not sure if this has happened already or not).
> 
> > My computer is almost max'ed out... full 8GB memory, all Samsung Spinpoint
> > F3 harddisks (which are the best of non-SSD kinds).  I could upgrade to
> > quad-core, but even if I get 4x linear improvement, it won't be enough.
> > I guess I can go with a full-loaded i7 machine.  But, my VW diesel doesn't
> > need a block heater.
> 
> The i7s don't run that hot.  That's what my wife's desktop has.
> Nice quiet machine. :)

Okey, I tried out 3 virtualizations, and here is my comments...

1. VirtualBox -- Cleanest website.  You download "doc" (pdf or html), and
".run" binary.  After installing guest OS, you need to install "Guest Additions"
within the guest OS, if you want better video/mouse support.  CentOS-5.4
was too old as guest OS, and OpenSUSE-11.2 hangs on install.  Other than
that, Slackware32/64, Fedora-12, Ubuntu-9.10, and Windows 2003/7 work
okey.

2. KVM -- Website and documentations were confusing.  But, it compiles and
installs on Slackware, so it should work for other distro.  Since it doesn't have
GUI frontend, you have to type command-line, which is not as bad as it sounds.
However, KVM is too slow, so much so that it's useless in practice.

3. VMware Player -- Most confusing and useless PR/bullshit website.  If I didn't
know I wanted Player, I wouldn't know what to do or where to go.  Anyways,
it fails to compile some kernel modules on my Slackware64-13.0 (2.6.32.2 kernel).
I don't know, because VirtualBox and KVM compiled their modules without any
problems.

My recommendation is to try VirtualBox.  You need big monitors though, enough
to accommodate multiple windows of 1024x768 minimum size.  If the VM is too
small, you won't be able to reach OK/Cancel buttons. :-)

Next in my list is GPU programming.

--William



      __________________________________________________________________
Looking for the perfect gift? Give the gift of Flickr! 

http://www.flickr.com/gift/
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists