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Thanks for posting this! I agree 100%, most people don’t expect someone to show them exactly how to use a mac, or a pc. They know that it’s a mac or a windows machine. That’s “easy”… Well, if we’re talking about Ubuntu and derivatives, it’s just as easy. And google is your friend! I can’t say how many times I have come across a problem that I have no idea how to fix, and I simply fire up Chromium and within 30 seconds I have the answer. Normal people could likely find an answer not too much slower. Now, I am not talking about my Granny or the my 5 yr old sister, they need instruction. And really, they don’t have much reason using a computer anyway. Now, I have been a Linux user for about 1 year(windows vista on family computer before I got my own mac, which I used purely for about 6 months). I’ve spent much of my time in Ubuntu, since it has the best support for my evil(but beautiful) Apple hardware. I consider myself a pretty experienced user, I’m always searching out more knowledge about my system, often messing it up and having to fix it(learning even more!) in the process. I know most people don’t want/need that, but it works for me. And I wasn’t spoon fed answers. I didn’t go whining to some guru and find my answer. I read man pages, browse the forums, follow tech blogs. Again, most people won’t do that. So I have no problem helping with an issue after they have tried to figure it out on their own. I’ll teach them just a little bit more about the system. I have actually converted several friends to Linux(from vista.. blech), and they are very happy. As long as they don’t mess with anything, they can use their computers easily. That’s their path, just getting by. Mine is to enjoy learning through the journey… Not getting to the end, but becoming smarter, figuring things out. I love it. Lets teach others our love of learning, and show them how to learn for themselves. Remember, teaching is not pounding facts into your head, teaching is giving you the tools to learn!

dreadpirate15,
Isaiah J Roberts,
Izzy,
=)

Hi,

I just found (discovered) this site, thanks to a post by […]).

I’m an experienced Windows IT guy (10+ years), with near no linux experience :(. This year I finally get a decent laptop having a 2Ghz dual core CPU and 4 GB RAM, so thought its time to start learning linux with a virtualization solution (test,review big distros under virt., also have a ready to use XP guest). I just want to find the best way to do for the following :

• install a tiny footprint (bare bones) linux OS for virtualization hosting. Which linux OS should I choose : Ubuntu JEOS, openSuse with 1000 GHz kernel, tinyCore linux, puppy… ?
  which virt. solution is best suited? Xen, KVM, Vmware Esxi or just vmware server, virtualbox… ?

Unfortunately, after 2 weeks of searching (googling), I have still many questions on my mind. I mean, internet and google don’t always provide the answer we look for :( . In such cases, only thing to do is asking to an experienced one and get advices about it.

Best regards.

For laptop-based virtualization and just to learn, VirtualBox is hard to beat. There is very little risk and zero cost. In fact, I don’t recall even having to reboot to install and use Vbox.

If you are willing to wipe your current OS, you have more choices in hypervisors, but then you also have a much larger commitment towards any single hypervisor. It probably isn’t worth it until you gain more experience.

As to which client OSes to run – there’s really no commitment beyond disk space. Try them all. Any that you don’t like, delete from the hypervisor control and delete the virtual disk. No risk.

After you become addicted to virtual machines, you may decide to purchase a commercial desktop hypervisor, like VMware Workstation. I’m not there and doubt I ever will be unless it is $20. I have highly technical friends that I respect who swear by VMware-Workstation, so that endorsement means a bunch.

Hi again.

I decided to use Virtualbox as hypervisor. What about the hosting OS, the OS on which Virtualbox will be run? I actually clueless about this. My laptop has 2 HD’s, Vista is preinstalled on the first HD, I’m gonna use the second HD as a dedicated virt. host OS and that OS should be a 64 bit (to use 4 GB RAM), fast and leightweight Linux OS so that the guest Linuxes that I’ll install show their full power and speed (well, almost…).

What’s your opinion on this? Many thanks for sparing your valuable time for kindly answering :).

No problem. I figure your questions are common enough that other “lurkers” will find value too. If you prefer, email me (or post it in a reply; I’ll remove your address during moderation).

I currently run Vbox with Win7 x64 as the host. I previously ran it with Vista x64 for over a year. If the specific machine wasn’t my only Windows machine, I probably would have used a different OS, but we all need to Windows driver support at some level. I don’t like dual booting – been there, done that. Since I haven’t thought about that deeply, I don’t have a well thought out answer for which host OS goes best with VirtualBox. Sorry.

I did try to use Ubuntu as the host for VirtualBox on a test machine, but soon found dependency issues (other VM tools installed on that server) that I was unwilling to solve at the time.

If you want to know which OSes VirtualBox runs on, perhaps reading the VirtualBox.org wiki would help? I suspect reading through the problem reports for each potential OS before you make a selection could help with the decision too. There’s also differences between the the FOSS version and the proprietary licensed, buf still free version, that you need to decide. Normally, I’d go with the FOSS version, but USB VM support was important enough to me to make an exception. Sun has a long, honorable history with open source, so I wasn’t too concerned on that front.

32-bit or 64-bit doesn’t matter so much with non-Microsoft OSes that have 4GB of RAM. More important are the APIC settings when the OSes are loaded and the number of virtual CPUs that you give to each VM. In theory, changing the number of CPUs after Linux installation shouldn’t matter, but I’ve had lockups in a client after changing from 1 to 2 procs (virtualbox didn’t always support multiple cores in client OSes).

If you want a light-weight host OS, only install the ssh server – nothing else. No LAMP stack, no desktop. Get used to using ssh and vim if you want to become good with UNIX. Then load only the dependencies required to make Vbox run. Save all the custom packaging for inside a VM.

I have installed OpenSUSE with KDE 64 bit to be used as a host. However, installing VirtualBox (even in a graphical interface) seems to be not so easy for me. I dl’ed 64 bit OpenSUSE specific installer from Sun, however it appears to be missing some other packages from the system (namely pam-…). I’ve opened YaST2 and checked the updates, refreshed package list, and YaST found hundredths of updates (and YaST unnecessarily listed many (or all?) of them as required by that pam-… package). The annoying part is, there are so many things to filter out (e.g. (megabytes maybe gigabytes of) Russian, Indonesian versions of software updates, which I never need and there is no language filter to ease the process) I had no so much time to review them one by one. Also, unfortunately my 4 GB limited internet access is soon to be reached its limits, so I could not simply select and install all of them. Strangely there was no multi selection option in the YaST and there was no a total download size indicator! Overall, I was not so impressed and liked this YaST thing.
I will wait for the next month to come so that I have a fresh 4GB download limit to consume :) If I think its not worth the time and effort I give, I’ll dump the OpenSUSE and maybe install Ubuntu 64bit desktop or server version (I think Ubuntu JeOS would also be a little complicated for me as a beginner).

Sorry that you’re having issues. PAM is related to authentication – pluggable authentication module, I’d guess. That’s how UNIXen allow you to select the method the system uses to authenticate users, including users like “virtualbox” which must have near-root privileges to work.

OpenSuSE is a fine distribution, just not one that I’ve used in the last few years. I did run it for about 3 years, however. Did you check the virtualbox wiki and see what the people running opensuse say there? The first google hit for virtualbox opensuse. There are slightly different instructions for 10.2 and 10.3+. As a new user, you are better off staying with a specific distribution depot to avoid “RPM hell”.

Out of curiosity, why don’t you just install virtualbox on vista and load all the different versions of Linux into VMs? That would be much easier and let you ease into Linux. Just a thought.

4GB/month? Are you on a cell phone data plan? Ouch.

There seems to be no relevant question and answer on wiki pages and opensuse pages for both latest versions of opensuse and virtualbox. There are generally discussions for old versions of virtualbox and suse. :(

Right now, I’m building an appliance online via SuSE Studio service, I have added virtualbox, xen, libvirt, yast and so on… I hope all dependencies will be solved and the build will work for me.

Well, pre-installed Vista on my Sony Vaio laptop is 32bit Home Premium. Therefore there is the extra workload coming from both Vista and many crapware that came with Vaio, so I want a cleaner, less-resoruce hog, faster base for running Virtualbox. That said, I’ll also be installing and running VirtualBox on this system too, just to test the speed differences, if any. If no noticable lagging exist on VirtualBox on Vista, maybe I’ll go that route.

My 32-bit Vista shows it has 4 GB at the computer properties, however at the task manager it displays a total of 3 GB physical memory : the 32 bit limit for memory mapping as said at various tech sites (though I have enabled the PAE extensions via some tweaker app).

I’m living in Istanbul/Turkey, and here accessing Internet is a little pricey (at least for me), I’m paying approximately $20 for a 8Mbit fast connection with 4GB/month cap. There are faster and limitless tariffs, naturally with much higher prices :(.
I’m generally surfing and downloading at the workplace, so 4GB is generally enough for me.

Another thing is, I have a 1 year old baby that cause me not spend so much time at home with my laptop anymore :) . Long before I became a husband, and then father I was spending nearly all my time with computers (programming, surfing, searching, gaming…), both at home and at work. Apparently those days are gone! I can use my home laptop only 1-2 hour a week now. What a change! :) This is one of the reasons that I’m still not a linux expert yet.

thanks.

Sorry for the delay. Christmas holidays here and I’ve a the flu for a few days.

I think you’ll find running VirtualBox with a Windows host will be the best performance due to hardware driver support under Windows. 32-bit Windows should see 3.5GB unless you have a video card with lots of memory.

I pay about US$45/month for 15/3Mbps connection with no cap (no advertised cap, I suspect 250GB could be the soft-limit). The actual price isn’t clear since I bundle a few other services with internet like phone and cable TV. I had 32Mbps/8Mbps last year under a different deal for the same price. Honestly, I can’t tell the difference between the two speeds. Most servers limit bandwidth to 1Mbps at most per download anyway.

I worked with a Turk for 3 years. Good guy, but he found the man/woman interaction too different in the USA to find his bride and moved home to get married. I don’t think he was able to come back. At that company, we had people from all over the world and all religions working together; Israeli, Egyptian, Korean, Chinese, USA, Swedish and customers all over the world. I understand that Turkey has been a crossroads for trade for thousands of years so that cultural and religious tolerance is part of the culture. Istanbul has been on my list of places to visit. Hopefully, I can get there soon.

@JohnP

Hey, I just wanted to apologize for not having clear attribution on that blog posting. I posted the draft, not my final copy. Thanks for bringing that to my attention! Also, the title links back to the original blog post on your site.

http://dreadpirate15.blogspot.com/2009/12/whats-wrong-with-new-linux-users-posted.html

^Edited
http://dreadpirate15.blogspot.com/2010/01/floss-piracy-and-novelists.html