[GTALUG] VM Support in Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: William Witteman via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| I am poking around in Android development, and I have run into a snag
| as my machine is pretty old, and doesn't have, or doesn't have
| enabled, some virtual machine features.  Specifically:
| 
| > To use VM acceleration on Linux, your computer must also meet these requirements:
| >
| > For Intel processors: Support for Virtualization Technology (VT-x), Intel EM64T (Intel 64)
| > features, and Execute Disable (XD) Bit functionality enabled.
| > For AMD processors: Support for AMD Virtualization (AMD-V).
| 
| I am not at all sure that my machine will do this - 

Apparently this half of your message was a throw-away, and we were
supposed to ignore it.  Odd.

| if I was looking
| for a new machine, are there any caveats, warnings, red flags to watch
| for?  I'd prefer not to have to spend a ton of time/money thinking
| about my hardware - I'd like it to run Debian with as little messing
| about as possible.

Only you know what features you would find useful.  You haven't
answered previous questions so I won't ask you to explain what you
want.

I'm guessing that you don't really want to get your hands dirty.  If
so, I suggest you pick a laptop.

Me?  I still like desktops.

- expandable / upgradability (within limits)

- faster

- more RAM, HDD space

Clearly your choices would be different from mine.  If you care about
my thoughts, from two years ago:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-mCQphZBuI>

A really good notebook is getting to be about $2k -- wow.
You can find useful ones at about $400-$600.

For Linux, I think that it is a good idea to avoid NVidia GPUs.  Intel
ones (built into their CPUs) are fine for what I do.

Avoid notebooks with no RAM sockets.  You might want to add RAM.