Everyone,
I have received enough comments against partitioning to where I will start
with virtualizing. This will at least give me a good feel of the Ubuntu
environment along with basic operations before I, somewhere in the future,
buy a laptop strictly for Ubuntu use. At that point I will be a little more
prepared for serious/complex installations, system tinkering, compiling,
etc.
Like Mike Bell suggested a while ago, I have been looking at Oracle's
VirtualBox here:
https://www.virtualbox.org/
First, how much have each of you used this and how has it turned out for
you? What are your positive and negative comments about it?
I have read over its documentation and am impressed of how it can run
different types of OS's as guest at the same time for different types of
host OS's. I am reading over the documentation and it has extreme
flexibility which I find attractive, and I am not even a sys admin.
My Windows 7 Pro 64-bit Intel quad-core CPU platform has a 1TB hard drive
and over 700GB is still free. As the documentation suggested, a fixed guest
hard drive space allocation is suggested. This is easy to understand as
there is less overhead and is more efficiency. So, for starting out, what
HD space should I allocate? I know it can be adjusted later
The documentation states that a fixed RAM amount for the guest must be
allocated. I have 4GB of RAM. As of this writing Windows is using 2.78 GB
of it. However, my 7 tabs of Chrome that are currently open hogs up A LOT
of that. For Chrome, each tab is its own process whereas with Firefox
everything is under one process. However, both browsers hog up a lot. But I
will probably put browser use on the Ubuntu side as I do everything on the
Windows side, for now.
So how much fixed RAM do you think I should allocate for the Ubuntu guest?
I know that fixed amount can be changed later.
Concerning RAM, will my Ubuntu guest environment use a little less RAM than
Windows with such things as browser use or will it still be about the same?
In other words, will an Ubuntu guest using VirtualBox be more efficient
with its memory use?
Also, concerning CPU usage, will the Ubuntu side be more efficient with it
and have less of a relative load on the processor than how Windows does
with it while running at the same time?
It looks like that with using VirtualBox, I won't have to deal with
hardware driver installations. I'll deal with that in the future with a
dedicated laptop and learning that is another personal desire. But
concerning software, will I still need to install Ubuntu versions of
everything? I hope so because I want to get as much of an Ubuntu feel that
I can. On the Ubuntu side, will I still sometimes need to compile from
source for a few things as they come along? Again, I hope so, too.
This just came to mind: what about printing to my Canon printer from the
Ubuntu side? I want to get used to doing that. What special setup, if any,
will I have to do to get that to work?
I also read that I can assign a shared folder. I love that idea as I can
point that to my user directory where I can access personal Windows
documents, media files, etc, from the Ubuntu side. What do you think.
That's about it for now. Let me know what you think.
Kory Pounds
--
www.oncedead.com
It is not what you do that determines who you are, it is who you are that
determines what you do.
