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mickkk
Asked: 2015-12-03 23:49:42 +0800 CST

Testing OS, external installation or virtualbox?

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I recently installed Ubuntu on my laptop and so far everything is fine, it works great. However, as a newbie, I made the silly mistake of not documenting myself too much about all the possible alternatives to Windows, such as Lubuntu, Linux mint, Fedora etc.. I would like to test some of these on my machine, however I prefer not to wipe out all the disk, and therefore I would like to test the system either on a virtual box (Boxes on Ubuntu should work fine) or on an external hard drive. (I own a 2.0 USB external hard drive)

I would like to test, say Fedora, and have it handy for a couple of weeks. My aim is to test the OS in an environment which makes it the closest possible to the actual installation on the internal hard disk (ie. experience the less slowdowns possible). Which one of the two options should I go for?

virtualbox

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I must disagree with all the other answers. To test a new OS the best way is a external HD, there are a couple of reasons:

    1. Most important, this is the only way to test your real hardware. VM installs are not running on your computer and you can fall in love with Fedora but when you install it in your real hardware making your wifi card (or something else) work could be difficult.
    2. Your read/write throughput to the external disk will be worse, but everything else (graphics, sound, processor) will run at real speed. If you try Ubuntu (with unity) on a VM the GUI will be slower (due to worse 3D access) than an external HD.
    3. Easy wipe, just delete the external HD.
    4. Easier data sharing that a VM. You can just mount your internal HD, no need to shared folders or things like that. You can even symlink your real program configuration or document folders for a seamless experience.

    The only real advantage of VMs, to me, in this situation, are snapshots.

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  2. least slowdowns would be actually installing to its own hardrive and running it off of that drive. obviously this would be because your computer is dedicating its resources to the OS itself.

    the next best option would be VMWare Player. you can download it free on their site. if your computer can handle the resource allocation (and you arent gaming or anything) then a virtual environment can allow you to test many different setups easily.

    the VMware download is here if you want it: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_workstation_player/12_0

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  3. You'd better choose VirtualBox. There are several advantages:

    • You could create a lab of many VMs running simultaneously (depends on your computer performance)
    • You could create snapshots when your VMs are well configured/run. Yet if make any mistake, you will be able to revert back.
    • You could benefit from VBoxManage command (create/modify/run/suspend/stop VMs and create/restore/delete snapshots) if you are advanced user. And so you could write scripts to automatically process your VMs.
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  4. For testing the look and feel of another distribution I would definitely go for a virtual installation in the first place for the following reasons:

    • No need to change the boot loader or the partition layout of your host, i.e. no risk of accidentally breaking your main OS.
    • Easy reverting any changes while playing around from creating snapshots.
    • Much better hard drive read/write speed as compared to an external USB2.0 drive.
    • Only a minimum of hard drive space required by using dynamically growing virtual disks.
    • Easy exchange of data from host and guest with network shares or shared folders.
    • Parallel access to applications on the host while running a test OS (think e.g. of a browser to search for help when stuck).

    Of course you will have to be aware of some delay and a bit more sluggish experience of a virtual guest OS but on a fairly well equipped host (Quad Core, >4GB RAM) this should not matter much.

    Applications that rely on a fast GPU may not perform as good as they do on bare metal. The virtual graphics driver from the guest additions will do it's best to overcome this but for gaming you may not want to use a virtual machine.

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