I've been playing around with minimal installs in Virtualbox, taking a snapshot at each stage of adding packages. Hard drive space is not an issue, but I want to get ubuntu running very lean on the RAM side.

So, I've got 11.04 installed with Unity, and I'll consider that my 'base'.

My question is, I see how much RAM I'm using in VirtualBox, but I'm wondering if when I install it natively, if the usage will be the same? I only gave the vbox machine 1G of ram, and I'm using about 22% (220MB) of it. I'm happy with that, it seems a lot less than the 1.1G of RAM I'm using on my full install.

I'm concerned that ubuntu only sees 1G of RAM in the vbox machine, and uses only a certain amount. If I install it natively, it will see more and use more?

Or is this 'logic' not sound?