On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 08:25, John E. Perry wrote:
I jumped in and installed VB into my desktop version on my laptop; it all appeared to go smoothly. I guess I'll find out how smooth the rest is when I finally get around to actually building vm's.
Where people often have trouble with VMs is that they accept all the defaults for a guest config without putting much thought into what those defaults are... eg trying to install openSUSE guest into a guest VM with only 256MB of RAM defined in the guest settings. Suggestion... set up a guest using the defaults, and then before you install the guest OS, select the VM from the list and click Settings. Poke through the settings and see if they actually make sense for your host hardware and the guest OS you want to install. If your hardware can handle it, I'd suggest bumping up a few defaults. - System > Motherboard > Base Memory - Basic rule of thumb I use here is... set to no more than 50% of your host RAM. So if you have 4GB, don't set this to 3GB... instead maybe 1.5GB is what it could be set to. You can set it higher that 50%, but then your host OS will probably start to swap fairly heavily depending on what you're doing on the host side, and you'll take a performance hit on both the host and the guest. - Display > Video > Video Memory - I always set this as high as possible (128MB) if the host video card can handle it - Display > Video > Extended Features - Enable 3D acceleration for all guests - Enable 2D acceleration for Windows guests (only works with Windows guests) - Storage Here you can point the virtual CD ROM drive at an ISO (eg the openSUSE 11.3 ISO) and boot from that. I've bumped into a possible bug here where it won't let you attach the ISO as a drive and assign it to the virtual CD ROM all in one step. You might see the same. Basically you attach the ISO and then when you try to assign it to the virtual CD ROM you get an error about the VM Name being invalid. I just exit out of the settings and go back in again and the problem resolves itself. Since you've installed on a laptop, you probably have limited resources (eg RAM). You might need to tweak the VM Settings a bit after install to find what works best... eg a WinXP guest can run fine on 512MB (or 768MB) of RAM which is a good match if you're running a laptop with only 2GB of RAM. If you've got 4GB you can bump that up to 1GB or 1.5GB (or even 2GB if you need to) without noticing it on the host side... and so on. All other settings are probably OK at default for your first try. You may want to explore the Shared Folders settings which will allow you to map shared directories on your host as network drives on the guest. Always install the GuestAdditions as the first thing you do after you boot a guest the first time. See http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html for instructions on how to install. This provides drivers and other things for the virtual hardware that vastly improves the performance of the guest OS. I use VirtualBox every day - when I'm working I have my openSUSE 11.3 host, and on top of that I have Ubuntu 10.04 running in Seamless mode and Windows XP or Windows 7 running in a window (I've got loads of RAM on the host side so I can easily run more than one guest at the same time). I can switch back and forth between all 3 OSes without any trouble. They have a common shared directory on the openSUSE host which shows up as a network drive on the guests, so I can test my work on 3 OSes at the same time. On the Windows guest, the only thing I've found that doesn't work so well is gaming (low frame rates being the main issue)... anything else including playing streaming web video works fine. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org