Now this is just bizzare!

[ClientAlive]

I'm typing this to you in my o/s in Virtual Box. This has got to be the coolest little thing I have ever seen! I'm gonna spend a little time tomorrow making a little replica of my o/s in here. Yeah, I guess that really is the way to say it, "in here." It's my o/s in a folder on my o/s. W-0-w . . .

Anyhoo . . . just wanted to comment. Kinda tripped out by this thing.

:popcorn:

[Thewhistlingwind]

Yeah, for real fun learn to set up a bunch of obscure OS's. Then you can surf risk free (Though you can still get your login credentials compromised if your not careful.)

(Suggestions include plan nine, the whole BSD family, Linux itself, Minix, and GNU hurd.)

And I had that reaction to the concept of a live CD. (In a way I still do.) Booting from a CD? Cool. Booting almost as fast as a real install with a flash drive anywhere theres towers? Pure win.

[Rasa1111]

:lol: newb! lol

Just kidding,
i just started playing around with VB myself a month or two ago.
My mind wasnt blown by it,
But it is pretty cool .lol

11.04 always gave me one problem or another in it, No matter what.
But a full install has none of the problems I had in VB.

My Debian install in VB is pretty decent though.
I havent messed with VB at all since I got Natty installed on its own partition a few days ago. lol

VB is a sweet tool though, Glad I finally decided to check it out. <3

[NightwishFan]

I love virtualbox for testing old linux distributions. I also keep my last legal copy of Xp around in it so I can help folks with Windows problems easier. Other than that I use it to test potentially destructive actions such as partitioning and installation issues before I dish out advice on them.

I use the OSE edition.

[yetiman64]

I'm typing this to you in my o/s in Virtual Box. This has got to be the coolest little thing I have ever seen! I'm gonna spend a little time tomorrow making a little replica of my o/s in here. Yeah, I guess that really is the way to say it, "in here." It's my o/s in a folder on my o/s. W-0-w . . .

Anyhoo . . . just wanted to comment. Kinda tripped out by this thing.

:popcorn:

Virtualbox can be a total mind blower alright.

Vista Host-Ubuntu Guest:

Imagine Ubuntu Lucid panels installed on a Window Vista (with video wallpaper) desktop. Full access to two very different systems at the same time. Done using desktop integration (one of the settings in VBox).

Or even better,

Ubuntu Host-Various Guests:

Ubuntu Lucid's cube set up with 6 faces (rotatable with mouse side buttons) and up to 4 other OSes (including 1 Windows XP and 3 other linux distro installs) each running fullscreen on their own cube face at the same time.

It helps if you have a quad core or better CPU, a good new video card and at least 8GB of ram for the last example above :lol:.

I've certainly had some fun with virtualbox in the past and swear by it for testing other OSes, though as Rasa1111 notes the installs are not identical between a HDD install and VBox install, but they are good to get an idea of other systems.

[LarsKongo]

VBox is fun. Great for learning without messing around with real hardware. (Though it helps to have a good CPU, RAM and GPU for more heavy systems.)

Installing Arch with the help of the wiki is one way to learn more GNU/Linux. Gentoo would be the most extreme. I've tried to install Gentoo in VBox, but I gave up at the most time-consuming part - compiling the kernel. If I would've tried that on a real computer and then giving up while it was compiling I suppose I would've b0rked my system. :p

But I really do wonder why I can't get compiz to work in an Arch guest machine. It works perfectly in an Ubuntu guest machine. :confused:

[NightwishFan]

If the guest additions compile right it should work. Ensure you have Arch's equiv of kernel-headers and essential build packages.

[Thewhistlingwind]

Installing Arch with the help of the wiki is one way to learn more GNU/Linux. Gentoo would be the most extreme. I've tried to install Gentoo in VBox, but I gave up at the most time-consuming part - compiling the kernel. If I would've tried that on a real computer and then giving up while it was compiling I suppose I would've b0rked my system. :p

Nothing that scrapping the partition table wouldn't fix. And installing gentoo in Vbox is kind of a fools errand, unless you have a top of the line SSD with unholy system specs, it can't be done in a reasonable time frame.

[nothingspecial]

I use it to test potentially destructive actions

Chicken :P

[jhonan]

Be careful with multi-layered virtualising; if you go down to the fourth level you might become trapped indefinitely.

[NightwishFan]

:popcorn: @ both of the above

[Thewhistlingwind]

:popcorn: @ both of the above

And now you have to clarify, which two?:D

[samalex]

Welcome to the world of Virtualization :) I have several OSes installed on my Ubuntu laptop via VirtualBox, and it is pretty neat to see various OSes running like this. Plus being a self proclaimed OS ***** VirtualBox really opens the door to test a wide variety of operating systems, modern, legacy, and obscure, without having to dedicate an entire system to it. Plus if you get a new system you can move the entire image over with nothing to loose.

What I REALLY like though are there's tools to virtualize physical systems, so like at work when I moved from Win XP to Win 7 I was able to make an image of my Win XP box and I now run it virtually since there's still lots of stuff I had that just won't work on Windows 7.

Pretty neat stuff --

[ClientAlive]

I love virtualbox for testing old linux distributions. I also keep my last legal copy of Xp around in it so I can help folks with Windows problems easier. Other than that I use it to test potentially destructive actions such as partitioning and installation issues before I dish out advice on them.

I use the OSE edition.


That's a great idea too eh? To be able to switch to whatever o/s a person your guiding through steps is on. Then you see exactly what they do.

You can partition within it too?


Virtualbox can be a total mind blower alright.

Vista Host-Ubuntu Guest:

Imagine Ubuntu Lucid panels installed on a Window Vista (with video wallpaper) desktop. Full access to two very different systems at the same time. Done using desktop integration (one of the settings in VBox).

Or even better,

Ubuntu Host-Various Guests:

Ubuntu Lucid's cube set up with 6 faces (rotatable with mouse side buttons) and up to 4 other OSes (including 1 Windows XP and 3 other linux distro installs) each running fullscreen on their own cube face at the same time.

It helps if you have a quad core or better CPU, a good new video card and at least 8GB of ram for the last example above :lol:.

I've certainly had some fun with virtualbox in the past and swear by it for testing other OSes, though as Rasa1111 notes the installs are not identical between a HDD install and VBox install, but they are good to get an idea of other systems.


Wish I had the RAM for some of those things. Doh! I need a new computer.
:D


Be careful with multi-layered virtualising; if you go down to the fourth level you might become trapped indefinitely.


lol. Looks like someone's been watching Inception lately. Oh, wait! Can that really happen? :D


Welcome to the world of Virtualization :) I have several OSes installed on my Ubuntu laptop via VirtualBox, and it is pretty neat to see various OSes running like this. Plus being a self proclaimed OS ***** VirtualBox really opens the door to test a wide variety of operating systems, modern, legacy, and obscure, without having to dedicate an entire system to it. Plus if you get a new system you can move the entire image over with nothing to loose.

What I REALLY like though are there's tools to virtualize physical systems, so like at work when I moved from Win XP to Win 7 I was able to make an image of my Win XP box and I now run it virtually since there's still lots of stuff I had that just won't work on Windows 7.

Pretty neat stuff --


I've wanted to mess with Blackbuntu for a while now. I downloaded the image last night. Now I can play with it in Virtual Box!

About that last thing: I'd been wondering about that. You know, rather than go through all the drama of recreating your o/s to just run a copy of the actual o/s in there. Thanks for the clue! I wonder if it takes all your configurations and everything over.

Jake

[forrestcupp]

Be careful with multi-layered virtualising; if you go down to the fourth level you might become trapped indefinitely.

I was about to suggest trying that out. It was jokingly discussed in another thread a while back. In your virtual OS, install VirtualBox with another OS in that. Then keep doing that and see how deep you can get without crashing your computer. :)

[sydbat]

I'm typing this to you in my o/s in Virtual Box. This has got to be the coolest little thing I have ever seen! I'm gonna spend a little time tomorrow making a little replica of my o/s in here. Yeah, I guess that really is the way to say it, "in here." It's my o/s in a folder on my o/s. W-0-w . . .

Anyhoo . . . just wanted to comment. Kinda tripped out by this thing.

:popcorn:Um...you do realize it is starting to get all warm and sunny outside, right?? :P The preceding was humour. [/jk]

On topic - I prefer VMWare. It seems to work better than VirtualBox ever did.

[ClientAlive]

I was about to suggest trying that out. It was jokingly discussed in another thread a while back. In your virtual OS, install VirtualBox with another OS in that. Then keep doing that and see how deep you can get without crashing your computer. :)


That would be a great way for the developers of VB to test it. The idea being that if you can get it to go an indefinite number of installs deep (with regard to system resources of course) and still work perfectly in the last one - you have a winner!


Um...you do realize it is starting to get all warm and sunny outside, right?? :P The preceding was humour. [/jk]

You made me laught man. Yeah, mole man here - holed up in his dark, dank basement, virtually blind from decades away from the sun, he's sees only computers, and he likes it. He doesn't know what day it is or even what year - just computer's and that's good enough enough for him.

How sad!

:popcorn:

[yetiman64]

...You can partition within it too?...

Most definitely yes, all three other linux OSes in my second example in post 5 had root, home and swap partitions installed within the vdi file that is the guest machine HDD.

The guest machine file stored on your HDD is hooked up to a PATA or SATA controller within the Virtualbox software and acts as if it were a true hard drive to the virtualization software.

This as nightwishfan notes is a good safe place to practice partitioning and manual installing. If you blow it in here while partitioning you only mess up the .vdi file and not the hard drive it is on, very handy :).

[Rasa1111]

You made me laught man. Yeah, mole man here - holed up in his dark, dank basement, virtually blind from decades away from the sun, he's sees only computers, and he likes it. He doesn't know what day it is or even what year - just computer's and that's good enough enough for him.

How sad!

:popcorn:

ahhahaha! :D :popcorn:


sydbat~ On topic - I prefer VMWare. It seems to work better than VirtualBox ever did.

Nice, thanks! Ill have to check it out. :)

[forrestcupp]

Um...you do realize it is starting to get all warm and sunny outside, right?? :P The preceding was humour. [/jk]

On topic - I prefer VMWare. It seems to work better than VirtualBox ever did.

It wasn't funny.

VMware works better, but it's a lot more of a pain in the butt to set up.

[sydbat]

It wasn't funny.

VMware works better, but it's a lot more of a pain in the butt to set up.True.

[DZ*]

It's my o/s in a folder on my o/s. W-0-w . . .

Have you tried a deeper nesting? ;-)
OS in an OS in an OS ...

I keep Ubuntu under Fedora at work just for running LaTeX. Fedora tends to have fresher packages except for texlive because Fedora's more rigorous copyright audit or something got stuck.

[aguafina]

It wasn't funny.

VMware works better, but it's a lot more of a pain in the butt to set up.


I thought VMware was payware?

[sydbat]

I thought VMware was payware?Just like VirtualBox, VMWare has a paid version. Also like VB, VMWare has a free for personal use edition.

[forrestcupp]

I thought VMware was payware?

Some people don't like to use the free of charge version of VMware because it isn't open source.

The paid version makes some things easier and it comes with VMware tools, which is a necessity for smooth functioning. The free of charge VMware Player doesn't come with tools, but it's possible to legally get it installed if you don't mind doing the extra work.

[VCoolio]

virtualbox rocks. I can use my printer in ubuntu in virtualbox, where I can't with archlinux which is the host os. Go figure. So if I need to print something, I drop it in my dropbox folder and print with ubuntu in virtualbox. How's that for KISS?
:popcorn:

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

I'm typing this to you in my o/s in Virtual Box. This has got to be the coolest little thing I have ever seen! I'm gonna spend a little time tomorrow making a little replica of my o/s in here. Yeah, I guess that really is the way to say it, "in here." It's my o/s in a folder on my o/s. W-0-w . . .

Anyhoo . . . just wanted to comment. Kinda tripped out by this thing.

:popcorn:

When you are ready to explore virtualization further, you could try Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud...http://www.ubuntu.com/business/cloud/overview.

Minimum requirements in order to try it are on this page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEC/CDInstall. The page also includes installation instructions for a minimal installation on a private cloud.

You can use it for free provided you have computers that meet the minimum requirements.

Edit: Ubuntu has a subforum for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud at http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=392.

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

I thought VMware was payware?

You can set up virtualization on workstation for free using VMware; however, if you want to use virtualization on servers or data centers, it does cost quit a bit of money for the licenses.

[3rdalbum]

Yo dawg, I heard you like OSes, so I put an OS in your OS, so you can use an OS while using your OS.

I don't think you can actually get to the third level, but I'd encourage you to try it - you'll probably get a funny error message or something (like people did when they tried running Connectix's Playstation emulator within Connectix's PC emulator).

[NightwishFan]

It's possible just bloody difficult. :)

Well actually I tried today. I managed to get a virtual machine to run in a virtual machine, however the debian installer hung so I could not get the third level to run.

[ClientAlive]

Have you tried a deeper nesting? ;-)
OS in an OS in an OS ...

I keep Ubuntu under Fedora at work just for running LaTeX. Fedora tends to have fresher packages except for texlive because Fedora's more rigorous copyright audit or something got stuck.


I only have a gig of memory and it's an older machine (I don't think It's even performing right). I'm lucky to get VB running at all eve w/ one o/s in it. Wish I could though. Maybe one of these days when I have an extra $800 or so lying around. Ha Ha.

:)

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

I only have a gig of memory and it's an older machine (I don't think It's even performing right). I'm lucky to get VB running at all eve w/ one o/s in it. Wish I could though. Maybe one of these days when I have an extra $800 or so lying around. Ha Ha.

:)

From personal experience, to run virtualization without performance problems, you really need to have at least a dual core 2GHz processor with 4GB of RAM.

My laptop with those specs can run Ubuntu as the host OS and Vista as the guest OS. If I use Linux distros for the guest OSes, I can run Ubuntu as the host OS and 2 Linux distros as the guest OSes. I have run 3 Linux guest OSes at the same time; however, they were light weight Puppy, DSL, Chrunchbang, Lubuntu, Tiny Core, etc., OSes.

In the datacenter where I work, we typically have 1 Virtual Machine (VM) per core (we don't use Vista), 2 GB RAM per VM, and 20 GB disk strage for the Linux OS or 40GB disk storage for a Microsoft OS per VM. Of course we allow for extra disk storage for things like databases, file servers, etc. We have Blades with dual quad core processors in the datacenter; therefore, we are averaging 8 VM's per server.

[Exodist]

I'm typing this to you in my o/s in Virtual Box. This has got to be the coolest little thing I have ever seen! I'm gonna spend a little time tomorrow making a little replica of my o/s in here. Yeah, I guess that really is the way to say it, "in here." It's my o/s in a folder on my o/s. W-0-w . . .

Anyhoo . . . just wanted to comment. Kinda tripped out by this thing.

:popcorn:

VBox is a powerful tool. I also keep WinXP installed in a VM just in case I need to run something in windows, or to check XHTML compatibility with IE.

When you get into big time cluster server management, you will find you can have 4, 5, 6 or even more Server OS installed and running at the same time inside VM Ware or VBox.

Its perfectly common to find many high end corporations running Linux servers, each for a separate functions for load balancing and also to have MS Exchange server for email. ;-)

[ClientAlive]

VBox is a powerful tool. I also keep WinXP installed in a VM just in case I need to run something in windows, or to check XHTML compatibility with IE.

When you get into big time cluster server management, you will find you can have 4, 5, 6 or even more Server OS installed and running at the same time inside VM Ware or VBox.

Its perfectly common to find many high end corporations running Linux servers, each for a separate functions for load balancing and also to have MS Exchange server for email. ;-)


Wow. Sounds pretty high tech.

I was reading the help file for this thing and saw a section on .ovp (open virtualization protocol). Oh my the applications this could lend itself to:

*Technical support where the person in need of help can transfer their o/s to the tech support person, he works on it/ fixes it then sends it back.

*Collaboration on everything from new builds to configuration to whatever (multiple people working on the same thing at once)

*Even just sharing something cool you made with a friend.

*And a whole bunch of other stuff I'm sure I haven't even begun to think of.

I think I'm gonna enjoy this. One of the things I though I could do some time in the future (when I may have an extra laptop) is go to public places and offer free try outs of Linux or even other operating systems. Get that computer set up so the host o/s is just bare bones for running the virtual machine and whatever guest operating systems you have on it then install a but load of operating systems (read: 'Linux Distros') in the vb. Go downtown or to a local shop you've gotten permission and put up banners and people would come and try out whatever o/s they want from the list. Bring a bunch of blank cd's and be ready to burn one of those Linux distros off for them when they ask. You could even ask for 15 cents or 25 cents to cover the cost of the blank cd if you needed to. If nothing else everyone would have a ton of fun.

:D

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

Its perfectly common to find many high end corporations running Linux servers, each for a separate functions for load balancing and also to have MS Exchange server for email. ;-)

We tend to break the functions down to smaller pieces so that the failure of one server or VM will have a the minimum impact to the users or infrastructure. We have the Domain Name Server (DNS) on one VM with a backup VM, the email server on another VM, the LDAP server on another VM with a backup VM, same goes for Windows Active Directory, and so on and so fourth. We defiantly do not want the user to loose productivity; because, that will impact the corporation's profits.

[ClientAlive]

Someone mentioned a couple diff operating sytems before. Speaking of operating systems - check this out . . .

http://www.osnews.com/story/1385/Comparing_MenuetOS_SkyOS_and_AtheOS

Didn't know those were out there. Cool!

:popcorn:

[yetiman64]

Someone mentioned a couple diff operating sytems before. Speaking of operating systems - check this out . . .

http://www.osnews.com/story/1385/Comparing_MenuetOS_SkyOS_and_AtheOS

Didn't know those were out there. Cool!

:popcorn:

--Link for Distrowatch-- (http://distrowatch.com/) Note the top 100 list on the right side of the page (Page hit rankings). Have fun :lol:

[Spice Weasel]

--Link for Distrowatch-- (http://distrowatch.com/) Note the top 100 list on the right side of the page (Page hit rankings). Have fun :lol:

That's just BSD and Linux distros, though. :P

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1225814.html

http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html (has screenshots of GUIs, most of them of obscure operating systems)

[yetiman64]

That's just BSD and Linux distros, though. :P

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1225814.html

http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html (has screenshots of GUIs, most of them of obscure operating systems)

Yep, my link is only the "tip of the iceberg" by comparison with those ):P

[ClientAlive]

Yep, my link is only the "tip of the iceberg" by comparison with those ):P

Tip of the iceberg? Well what do you mean yetiman64? Oh do please tell . . .


:D

[yetiman64]

Tip of the iceberg? Well what do you mean yetiman64? Oh do please tell . . .


:D

Penguins sit on the top of icebergs and below is a lot of unseen stuff :biggrin: