Booted from a CD (a cute mini CD actually) and everything works at blazing fast speeds and responsiveness. YouTube videos included.
Damn you VirtualBox, I’ll have my revenge!
And? Interesting but not really relevant. People have been talking about the performance of Linux in a VM.
Quotes from Virtualbox’s wikipedia page
“The user can independently configure each VM and run it under a choice of software emulation or hardware assisted emulation if the underlying host hardware supports this.”
All I’m saying is that if the person’s CPU and motherboard doesn’t support hardware virtualisation, then that would force Virtual Box to use software mode, and could be what is impacting performance.
Whether you call it virtualisation, emulation or a banana, the performance hit would be there.
Bees: normally speaking booting from the Live CD is really slow compared to a hard drive installation. You should at least try a Live USB stick.
Having said that, the method of VM that you are running is known to be a dog. Because you are running the VM within Windows, it will never be faster than Windows because you are basically at the mercy of the Windows kernel allocating resources (which is honestly horrible) to VirtualBox then VirtualBox handling virtual resources to the guest OS. In summary, there will definitely be a penalty in speed terms due to all the extra layers of software.
The VM setups that other people mentioned running in datacenters are a different architecture. In the case of RHEV or VMWare, etc. there is a teeny, tiny Linux kernel running the hardware allocation. On top of that are the guest OSs. The cruft is thus minimized, and according to the engineers who have done the math, the energy consumption of the entire system is minimized.
The setup that you are running maximizes the cruft running on your hardware with the corresponding performance hit. Except it’s really easy to set up, so that’s the upside. The true intention of the VM architecture that you are using is for software testing where speed is not necessarily important, just to check compliance.
Long story short, just install it side by side on your harddrive. Just make sure you clone your harddrive before, so that if you want to return the the same exact setup as before you can nuke it easily.
What would be the difference between a Live CD and Live USB, on a practical level?
In either case, it seems I was doomed from the beginning and I’ve just been kicking and screaming in my unacceptance of my fate. Sigh.
Live USB tends to be quicker, and you can save any config changes you make. On the other hand, most people are more familiar and comfortable with booting from a CD than a USB stick. (Plus, CDs are cheap if you want to make giveaway items for people to try.)
If you still need Windows for anything, you can always run it in VirtualBox. In my experience, that works better than the other way around. Like I said, I do that at work–my company still insists on using quite a bit of Windows-only software, so I’m stuck with it.
Hm, turning the tables, that’s an interesting idea. Though I’m not confident running running video games in a VirtualBoxed Windows is going to be satisfactory either.
Probably not. The virtual graphics hardware is not what you’d call impressive, and tends to have trouble even with relatively old games. You should check out Wine, though–a lot of games run well in it. There are also more Indie games coming out with Linux support–keep an eye out for the Humble Bundles.
I do keep a Windows box for a few games that I can’t run any other way, though.
If you’re going to try a live CD, I strongly recommend Puppy Linux. Puppy is designed to be compact and light (only 100mb altogether), and will load the entire operating system into RAM so that performance won’t take a hit from constantly accessing the optical drive. Slacko Puppy can even boot from a flash drive. Even if you decide not to go with Linux permanently, it makes a great back up disk when Windows lets you down.
It was named after a chihuahua, that alone is almost enough for me to never to consider it. Be right back, getting my flash drive. 
When it comes to booting from a flash drive or disc, is there a way for me to save certain preferences? For example, if I boot from disc, I have to get my Firefox settings and plug-ins all arranged just how I like them. And the next time I boot from disc, I have to get them all arranged again.
Is this one of the downsides of booting from a flash drive or disc, since I’m technically “trying it out”? For all these sorts of things to be saved for real would be to actually just install right to my hard drive alongside Windows, correct?
Nevermind (Firefox seems to think nevermind is two words, is this right?) the settings for the Ubuntu GUI, such as what appears in the launcher and other things I’ve installed.
Well, a CD is read-only, so you can’t save settings to it. The CDs are mostly for demos, or for troubleshooting and repair tools these days.
You should be able to save stuff when booting from a flash drive, though. When you make a bootable flash drive, one of the steps should ask you if you want to reserve space for your documents and settings. Select the space you want to reserve (which should probably be as much as it will let you), and it will create a persistence file that will retain settings, documents, and even new programs that you install. (Subject to space limitations, of course.)
That’s actually one of the neat features in Puppy (mentioned upthread) that uses multisession CD or DVD burning to save all your settings/changes to optical media. And the nice fringe benefit of that is that you get chronological backups of all your changes!
I think there are a few distros messing around with this, but Puppy does it particularly well, specially with a smallish install on a DVD - a CD isn’t going to leave you much empty space to work with.
In addition to saving a file on a rewriteable DVD or CD, Pupply during its first shutown can create a file on a flash drive or hard disk saving your settings, documents, and newly installed software, subject to space limitations.
Granted, Puppy can’t compete toe to toe with Windows or Mac, but it’s a great emergency backup, it’s easy to learn and use, and if you’re not a power user you can do pretty much anything you need to do with it. Puppy is especially suitable on older machines, making a Pentium 4 with 512mb of RAM and a 40gb hard disk into a serviceable machine. It’s hard to believe this OS is free.
Is my enthusiasm showing?
I got sucked in to Linux/Ubuntu shortly before consumer NAS devices became commonplace. Built a box for our home office so Mrs. Devil and I could easily work on the same files. We’ve switched over to NAS devices for ease, but there’s Linux under their hood.
Just installed a virtual Ubuntu (11.10) on my machine using Oracle’s Virtualbox. It’s fantastic. I threw 4GB of RAM at it so I have no problems with it. I’m finally free of that nagging worry of hitting compromised sites and screwing up our business files. Backups be damned, I don’t want the hassle or possibly information getting out. Someone in my advice thread said surfing from a Linux VM is like surfing the Web with a full body condom.
I know it’s unwise to say things are bulletproof, but holy cow is this a nice feeling. VMs are going on all the public machines in the house. Relatives from Russia visit and want to go to who knows where. I don’t want to stereotype, but the thought of them going to I Can haz Borcht scares the crap out of me. No more!
Has anyone in the thread mentioned the Linux biographic film, Revolution OS? It’s very well done and fascinating.
Oh, aside from safe surfing, is there anything I’d want to do in the VM instead of the regular Win7 OS?
Well, I only use Windows for one thing, so perhaps I’m biased, but if you are more comfortable surfing in Linux than Windows, I’d suggest taking care of all of your email in Linux, also. That way, if you do click on a Trojan Horse or successfully phished, you are still safe. Obviously, you’ll want to set up your VM so you can write to the Windows hard drive.
Bear in mind that your VM is not necessarily isolated, in this regard: Depending on just how you’ve set up your in-house LAN, and how your firewalls are set up, it might possible for malware on one machine to reach out and infect other machines on your LAN. And your VM can participate in your LAN just as if it were another separate physical machine.
So, what happens in your VM may not directly reach out and trash files on the disk of your host machine, but it could possibly reach out and trash other machines on your network via your LAN, and your host machine itself is as vulnerable as any other. VM’s are not isolated from your in-house net in this way.
Your internal firewalls still matter.
The compilers and associated tools are written for Linux first and then only ported to Windows later, and even then support for Windows will very often not be as good as it is on Linux. Specific examples: Google Go, Git, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
I believe his point was that he would be running Linux in the VMs, and that’s all he would allow guest access to. That means that the overwhelming majority of malware won’t be able to get a foothold at all.
Before getting to the firewalls question, is there anything I can/should be doing on the VM machine to make browsing safer? Part of my long-term skittishness of browsing on my work machine is the nature of some sites I need to visit—small civil society and non-governmental agencies in developing countries. Many of these organizations have made significant institutional adversaries (government and otherwise) and are often compromised. The technology on their end to host or code is often fairly low, so the likelihood of malicious code running on their sites is (I assume) fairly high.
Right now I have no shared folders in its settings, and the machine and all files are on a single drive—there is no ‘regular’ data on the drive, so if anything gets lost there it’s no problem (save reinstalling from a snapshot). To move things between VM and Windows I either use the clipboard or turn on a shared directory for the move then disable it (delete it in VM Settings).
So aside from browsing to the sites from the VM Linux machine, are there packages (or Firefox extensions) that will add a layer of safety?
As for firewalls … uh oh, that’s beyond my pay grade. Since the router is seeing traffic from the VM box as if it’s coming from my desktop, how do I filter it out? The NAS devices have password/logins in them, but that’s about it.
On a separate note(s):
Is there any way to get the menu bar to stay put? It keeps auto-hiding or moving out of the way whenever something is in front of it or maximized. I want it to always stay on top—always always always. I tried CompizConfig’s settings, but that didn’t get the thing to stay put.
Also, how do I get a second instance of a program to start? To use Windows as an example, if I shift-click a program in the taskbar, it starts a second window. If I’m, say, moving files between directories, I like to have two completely separate source/destination windows open (it slightly lowers the chances of doing Very Dumb Things). And once I do have two windows open, is there a way to give them each a separate icon on the launcher? Lastly, the launcher is make up of fat blocks of icons. Is there any way to use small icons and text so that the vertical height of each running/pinned application is small?
Thanks,
Yours in noobery,
Rhythm
I don’t know how to get multiple icons in the menu bar for multiple instances of the same program, but I thought CompizConfig’s settings allowed you to change the look and feel of the menu bar?
As for actually going with another instance of a program, just click it again while the first instance is in focus (otherwise it’ll just bring it to focus) in the menu bar or from the program directory.