Installation queries

[Michael Powell]

Glen Barber wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Jorge Biquez wrote:
>> I would like to hear if possible your comments and advice on this
>> taht's related ..
>> 
>> What if you have a to have several OS and distros to study or give
>> consulting and developing services. I have this scenario now and I
>> guess I have this optios.
[snip]
>> 
> 
> VirtualBox?

YES!
 
>> Thinking that you are looking to continue learning and you are
>> offering consulting services where clients have different
>> instllations. What would you choose of the above, if any? Or what would
>> you do?
>> 
> 
> FWIW, I run VirtualBox on all of my FreeBSD machines and my
> Mac for similar purposes.  It is much more convenient than carrying around
> extra disks or obscure disk partitioning.
> 

Me too. I have an AMD quad core and 8GB RAM. Virtualbox is one of the most 
painless ways to do this. Whichever OS you install in a VM it won't run as 
fast as it can if not a VM, but on the larger horsepower box it is very 
nearly  unnoticeable. It's close enough that I'm quite satisfied. In fact it 
is what I do if I need Office for anything, fire up a Windows VM.

I originally started doing this with a Pentium D 940 and 2GB RAM and it made 
the box a little sluggish. The move up to the higher horsepower box 
eliminated that. Virtualbox and higher horsepower gets my vote over 
continually monkeying around with altering slice/partitioning schemes. The 
more often you mess with that the higher the chance that you sooner or later 
make a little 'uh oh' and lose gobs of time wiping your drive and starting 
over.

-Mike