On 17/05/12 16:26, Ed Greshko wrote:

On 05/17/2012 02:03 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:

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All right, I admit it: I cannot read manuals and always understand what they contain. Show me how something is done and I know what to do and how to solve a problem. But read a manual...... :-( .

I have a simple question about VirtualBox to which I cannot find a straight answer. The question is:

do I need to create a new, separate, VirtualBox for every operating system I want to run (under openSUSE 12.1) or do I only install the one VB which will then have separate "boxes" within it for the various OSs?

For example, I want to be able to try out Milestone #4 of 12.2 but would like to try out some other distros just to see what they are about. Do I create a separate VB for each of these?

Now, suppose I also decide to install the old copy of Windows XP as one of the OSs. Another VB for this because XP is noway even remotely close to a Linux OS?

Someone please put me out of misery :-) . Anyone?

You install a single copy of VirtualBox (host) for Linux. Then you start the VirtualBox GUI and with that you create VirtualMachines. Each VirtualMachine would have its own Virtual Hardware Settings as well as its on Virtual Disks. The location of the Virtual Machines (sometimes referred to has guest O/S) are defined in the Preferences section of the VirtualBox GUI.

Oh Thank You, kind Sir! My beating heart is now still and I now can go ahead and create this VB :-) . I was thinking of creating VB with 200GB of space. Too much? 100GB? (BTW, your wife OK now or is she still throwing darts at my (imaginary) picture on the wall?) BC -- Using openSUSE 12.1 x86_64 KDE on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 17/05/12 17:13, Ed Greshko wrote:

Ooopsss.... Fingers slipped and sent this as a private message.... Sorry about that.

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Oh Thank You, kind Sir! Welcome....

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My beating heart is now still and I now can go ahead and create this VB :-) .

I was thinking of creating VB with 200GB of space. Too much? 100GB? When you install VB, very little gets installed to being with....

Then, you need to define where the VM's are to be kept. By default, I believe, they are kept as separate folders under $HOME/VirtualBox VMs/ with each subfolder the name of the VM being created.

I redefine that default and keep my VM's on their own partition. In my case that partition is 300GB since I have about 10 VMs active at anyone one time with room to spare for snapshots.

Right. 10 VMs X 30GB = 300GB. Meaning that for what I have in mind 100GB would be enough. But let's say 200GB because I have 900+GB to play with. Thanks for this reference point.

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(BTW, your wife OK now or is she still throwing darts at my (imaginary) picture on the wall?) He is fine, now. She actually wanted me to respond to someone else by telling them ç‰›é ­ä¸å°é¦¬å˜´. But I suggested it wasn't worth it.

I agree that it was irrelevant and not worth getting one knickers in a knot over it. (Something I learnt over the many years of being involved in reading posts in mailing lists :-) .) BC -- Using openSUSE 12.1 x86_64 KDE on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 17/05/12 18:16, Ed Greshko wrote:

On 05/17/2012 04:10 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:

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Right. 10 VMs X 30GB = 300GB. Meaning that for what I have in mind 100GB would be enough. But let's say 200GB because I have 900+GB to play with. Thanks for this reference point. Welcome..... Extra is always better since snapshots can take up space and they are nice to have.

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(BTW, your wife OK now or is she still throwing darts at my (imaginary) picture on the wall?) He is fine, now. She actually wanted me to respond to someone else by telling them ç‰›é ­ä¸å°é¦¬å˜´. But I suggested it wasn't worth it. I agree that it was irrelevant and not worth getting one knickers in a knot over it. (Something I learnt over the many years of being involved in reading posts in mailing lists :-) .)

Well, the funny thing is that while ç‰›é ­ä¸å°é¦¬å˜´ does translate to "irrelevant" in Google Translate it is in actuality an idiom with a much deeper meaning. That is really what was not worth the effort to explain.

Irrespective of what this "deeper meaning" may be, the whole thing was just simply not worth getting one's knickers in a knot about. For example, have you read the story about a town in Austria? Look here if not- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking,_Austria There are far more important things in the world to give one "wedgies" than what was stated. BC -- Using openSUSE 12.1 x86_64 KDE on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 17/05/12 19:06, Ed Greshko wrote:

On 05/17/2012 04:58 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:

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Irrespective of what this "deeper meaning" may be, the whole thing was just simply not worth getting one's knickers in a knot about. If there is one thing that I've learned in life it is to not diminish or devalue the feelings of another person....especially if they are ones significant other.

But of course. My wife knows that she always has my support. But she also accepts that when I tell her that she has been "naughty" that I didn't tell her this for a frivolous reason, and she takes it on-board . Naturally this occurs in the reverse direction :-) (more in this direction rather than the one above :-) - but this is only to be expected after 42+ years of being "institutionalised" :-D . In another 20 years I may even be allowed out on parole 8-) :-P ). BC -- Using openSUSE 12.1 x86_64 KDE on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

Basil Chupin wrote:

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My beating heart is now still and I now can go ahead and create this VB :-) .

I was thinking of creating VB with 200GB of space. Too much? 100GB?

Depends on what you want to do with it, but even 10Gb is sufficient.

-- Per Jessen, Zürich (7.6°C) you do not allocate hard disk space to virtual box. you allocate it to the virtual box vms, when you create the virtual disk for each vm. soo, each vm you create will have it's own virtual hard drive. and you can make the virtual hard drive for ms4 about 20 gigs, your xp vm about 40 gb and so on. in general, anything linux can live in less than 20gb, for windoze you would need to at least double it. of course, if you really know what you want and it is something -nix / -nux and you only use console,

On Wednesday 16 May 2012 09:42:25 pm Per Jessen wrote: the whole thing can live in less than 1 gb:) good luck, d. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 05/17/2012 05:16 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:

I think that what you are really talking here is about installing VB with the DYNAMIC option for space allocation. Doing this has the price of less than perfect performance as there is an overhead in trying to ensure that the disc space keeps growing to accommodate additional data - until at least when the VMs are stabilised.

I want to avoid this by simply assigning enough disc space to cover all my current and potential needs. And doing so I also have a clear idea of how much space I would need on an external HDD to do backups of the VMs.

Am I wrong in my thinking?

I don't know if you are wrong. All I can say is that I've always used Dynamic allocation....but what I do with my VMs isn't I/O intensive. So, I've not noticed any performance issues. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 5:44 AM, Basil Chupin wrote:

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I think that what you are really talking here is about installing VB with the DYNAMIC option for space allocation. Doing this has the price of less than perfect performance as there is an overhead in trying to ensure that the disc space keeps growing to accommodate additional data - until at least when the VMs are stabilised.

I want to avoid this by simply assigning enough disc space to cover all my current and potential needs. And doing so I also have a clear idea of how much space I would need on an external HDD to do backups of the VMs.

Am I wrong in my thinking?

I don't know if you are wrong.

All I can say is that I've always used Dynamic allocation....but what I do with my VMs isn't I/O intensive.  So, I've not noticed any performance issues.

Ah, OK. I was only stating this from what is pointed out in the Manual for VB.

So, maybe using the Dynamic allocation may be the way to go. May solve thinking about how much space to allocate to VB at the beginning :-) .

Umm, I think you misunderstand what dynamic means here. Dynamic does *not* mean an unlimited size drive that grows as you use it. There are two ways to define a virtual drive: - One is to define the drive size and have the entire drive size allocated immediately.... so say you define a drive as 30 GB, then a 30 GB file is created, and the file on your drive is 30 GB in size even if it contains only 5 GB of data. - The other is to define a dynamic drive size. This sets a *maximum* drive size, but the file containing the virtual drive is only as big as the data it contains.... so say you define a dynamic drive as 30 GB but only install 5 GB of data, then the file is only 5 GB.... BUT... once you install or use up the 30 GB of space in that virtual drive, that's it for that drive, it cannot grow any bigger than the 30 GB you defined. (there are ways to expand the size of a drive, but they have nothing to do with defining a Dynamic drive). In the end, regardless of using Dynamic or not, you still need to decide on how much drive space to assign to each VM you define. C. -- openSUSE 12.1 x86_64, KDE 4.8.2 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 17/05/12 17:42, Per Jessen wrote:

Basil Chupin wrote:

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My beating heart is now still and I now can go ahead and create this VB :-) .

I was thinking of creating VB with 200GB of space. Too much? 100GB? Depends on what you want to do with it, but even 10Gb is sufficient.

Agreed about that what one wants to do with the space allocated to VirtualBox is an important consideration, but if you consider that running a respectable copy of openSUSE one needs something like 20GB. By "respectable" I mean one which would allow one to capture TV programs, download DVD copies of Milestones, et al. 10GB of space would be too constrictive. BC -- Using openSUSE 12.1 x86_64 KDE on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org