February 2018 PLUG Meeting: Running elementary OS in a VM: Upsides and Pitfalls

Jason · February 04, 2018, 07:18:35 PM

Should be a great meeting tomorrow with Harry and I as Co-Presenters. We hope you can make it out!

Full details on the main page of the website here:

https://plugintolinux.ca/node/430

cod3poet · February 05, 2018, 10:05:30 AM

I will be attending so I look forward to seeing what you have got

Jason · February 05, 2018, 10:42:03 AM

Be great to see you again, Brian! I hope you enjoy the presentation.

fox · February 05, 2018, 11:02:49 AM

Sorry I can't make this meeting. I'm flying back from the States and won't be back in time. I hate to miss a to-and-fro between Jason and Harry; I'm sure it will be interesting.

Jason · February 05, 2018, 11:41:30 AM

Maybe somebody will offer in the future to record meetings and then we can post them on the website for you and other people to view. In any case, there will be a slide show to look at. I'll try and take some notes during Harry's comments, perhaps Bill can, too.

He was always great at taking notes on the meeting and posting them. What do you say, Bill?

ssfc72 · February 06, 2018, 08:34:31 AM

Thanks Harry and Jason for the very informative talk about the Distro Elementary and the 2 Virtual Machine software programs, VirtualBox and VMWare player.

All my notebook computers and Desktop computer, only have 4 Gig of memory, so if I had to allow 2 Gig of memory to the virtual machine guest OS, then I think the performance of the computer, would suffer.
So I don't think running a virtual machine software on my computers, would be an option for me. I will just stick with Dual Booting a windows OS and a Linux Distro and also running Linux Distros from a Live usb flash drive, using the Multiboot program.

Bill

cod3poet · February 06, 2018, 10:22:36 AM

That was a great meeting, it's always good to see new spins on desktop environments and to get a different view on running VM's instead of on bare metal hardware.

Bill I am more in your camp with running of USB sticks vs running VM's for machines with 4gb of ram.

I have to admit though Pantheon was pretty and really simple in a nice and elegant way.

Jason · February 06, 2018, 10:31:12 AM

My pleasure, Bill. It was fun to do and interact with Harry as co-host. I hope others enjoyed it as well.

As regards the memory allocated to the VM, you might already realize this Bill, but the RAM is only used up if the VM is running. When you shut it down the memory used is returned to the host.

As far as 4 GB being enough, it really depends on the host OS. I find that Windows 10 is okay to use with 4 GB but with less, it starts slowing down. So with Windows 10 as a host, you might not want to use a VM, especially if the OS on that VM uses more than 1 GB of RAM. But if it only uses 1 GB, and a lot of distros can, you should be fine just by allocating only 1 GB to it. And some distros say a minimum of 512 MB so you might be able to get away with less. The other consideration is that consumer laptops don't usually have separate video RAM so you might have 4 GB of RAM, but really 256 MB - 1 GB of RAM is allocated to graphics. That's the case with my ultrabook that I used at the meeting, so the host actually has even less memory available than they state in operation. I hate to say it, too, but Windows 10 is a pig unless it gets 4 GB of RAM, I don't care what Microsoft says. But Linux hosts can do with less.

However, I ran elementary in LM 18.3 Xfce with the same amount of RAM for elementary (1.5 GB) and it ran smoothly. Lighter desktops like Xfce, LXDE and perhaps MATE will use less RAM than Gnome, Cinnamon and (gulp!) KDE. So your best bet is just to note how much RAM you normally have left over with normal usage of your host OS (i.e. running whatever you will be running with guest VM) and then don't give any more than that to your guest. And just try it and see how it goes. There are a lot of factors at play.

I hope that makes sense and is helpful.

Also, the presentation in LibreOffice Impress 5.1.6.2 is attached although it should work in anything from LibreOffice 5.x up. I notice that LibreOffice 6.0 is out, too, for the early adopters!

Jason · February 06, 2018, 10:33:20 AM

Thanks, Brian. I'm glad you enjoyed it even though this is all old hat for you

I'm really busy this week but email me (or message me here) next week and we'll talk about that thing we talked about more.

cod3poet · February 06, 2018, 01:20:02 PM

Wonderful to see vmware player, it's funny that we walked through that as it actually came in handy in my day today. Centos 7 in Vmware player

Thanks Harry!

ssfc72 · February 06, 2018, 04:02:04 PM

Yes, I forgot about the notebook video, grabbing some of the computer memory Ram. So that reduces the notebook resources, futher.

It now occurs to me, that since I have more than one computer/notebook, I don't need to dual boot, with Windows, on them all.
I have imaged all the computers, so I could just blow Windows off one of the machines and only have a Linux Distto installed as a Host and also run a Virtual Machine software, to play around with other Linux Distros. :-)

Quote from: Jason Wallwork on February 06, 2018, 10:31:12 AM
My pleasure, Bill. It was fun to do and interact with Harry as co-host. I hope others enjoyed it as well.

As regards the memory allocated to the VM, you might already realize this Bill, but the RAM is only used up if the VM is running. When you shut it down the memory used is returned to the host.

As far as 4 GB being enough, it really depends on the host OS. I find that Windows 10 is okay to use with 4 GB but with less, it starts slowing down. So with Windows 10 as a host, you might not want to use a VM, especially if the OS on that VM uses more than 1 GB of RAM. But if it only uses 1 GB, and a lot of distros can, you should be fine just by allocating only 1 GB to it. And some distros say a minimum of 512 MB so you might be able to get away with less. The other consideration is that consumer laptops don't usually have separate video RAM so you might have 4 GB of RAM, but really 256 MB - 1 GB of RAM is allocated to graphics. That's the case with my ultrabook that I used at the meeting, so the host actually has even less memory available than they state in operation. I hate to say it, too, but Windows 10 is a pig unless it gets 4 GB of RAM, I don't care what Microsoft says. But Linux hosts can do with less.

However, I ran elementary in LM 18.3 Xfce with the same amount of RAM for elementary (1.5 GB) and it ran smoothly. Lighter desktops like Xfce, LXDE and perhaps MATE will use less RAM than Gnome, Cinnamon and (gulp!) KDE. So your best bet is just to note how much RAM you normally have left over with normal usage of your host OS (i.e. running whatever you will be running with guest VM) and then don't give any more than that to your guest. And just try it and see how it goes. There are a lot of factors at play.

I hope that makes sense and is helpful.

Also, the presentation in LibreOffice Impress 5.1.6.2 is attached although it should work in anything from LibreOffice 5.x up. I notice that LibreOffice 6.0 is out, too, for the early adopters!

fox · February 06, 2018, 04:39:25 PM

Quote from: ssfc72 on February 06, 2018, 04:02:04 PM
....

It now occurs to me, that since I have more than one computer/notebook, I don't need to dual boot, with Windows, on them all.
I have imaged all the computers, so I could just blow Windows off one of the machines and only have a Linux Distto installed as a Host and also run a Virtual Machine software, to play around with other Linux Distros. :-)

Bearing in mind, of course, that how well a distro works in a VM may not be how well it works on bare metal. So if your purpose is to do a preliminary test to see if it's worth trying, that makes sense. Or if like Harry, all you ever want to do is run the distro in a VM, then that's what you're doing.