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Virtual machines question

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  • 19-09-2010 1:39am
    #1
    dangerman
    Registered Users Posts: 1,169 ✭✭✭


    Hi,

    I'm running an old laptop with XP and I run virtualbox with an ubuntu install for rails dev. I love it - use photoshop etc. on XP and swap things across to ubuntu as needed.

    I'll soon have the funds (and dire need) to upgrade so I'm wondering:

    Say, on a laptop/desktop with 6-8 gigs of memory, is it better to run an ubuntu machine with a windows 7 VM or a windows 7 machine with an ubuntu VM?

    Perhaps it's a bit of a silly question; I can't help but feel the answer is windows 7, and run the linux vm, since windows will continue to be my 'primary' machine, ie. used for everything bar development/deployment.

    Thoughts welcome!
    Tagged:


Comments

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    #2
    JonJoeDali
    Closed Accounts Posts: 537 ✭✭✭JonJoeDali


    I had a separate Win 7 partition on my laptop for ages.

    Discovered I was never using it. Deleted it and topped up my home directory partition there a few weeks ago.

    Not a big fan of VirtualBox. It's a wonderful project and I can see how it's useful, but I'd hate to have to use it in a production environment/day-to-day use.

    Never really got into Photoshop. I use GIMP and InkScape. I'm not a graphics designer, but I find that they can do pretty much anything I need. I love the LaTeX plug-in for InkScape.


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    #3
    Herbal Deity
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,397 ✭✭✭Herbal Deity


    Dual boot, then run the physical install of Ubuntu within a VM in Win 7. You can do this with VMWare, dunno about Virtualbox. This way, if you ever have a need to boot into Ubuntu (and have better performance), you can, but you can also run it in a VM from Win 7, which will be adequate for most things.


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    #4
    Johnboy1951
    Registered Users Posts: 14,011 ✭✭✭✭Johnboy1951


    I would use Linux as the host and Win as the guest.


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    #5
    Tillotson
    Registered Users Posts: 218 ✭✭Tillotson


    If you're running photoshop and other graphics intensive applications it's better not to run them in a VM. IMHO buying a high spec laptop isn't worth it, it'd be cheaper to buy both a low spec, portable laptop and build a decent laptop. Also you'll never need 6-8GB of memory for Linux unless you're running many virtual machines; I used to run 3 Debian test servers on 2GB with KVM.


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