[conspire] VirtualBox, [qemu-]KVM, Debian, lists, ...

[Michael Paoli]

Well, a few semi-random points, added in-line below.

> Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2016 09:02:41 -0700
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: Re: [conspire] CABAL, water-table replenishment edition
> Message-ID: <20161029160241.GX26372 at linuxmafia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):
>
>> I expect to come, and hopefully finally get virtualization to work on
>> the laptop.
>>
>> As previously discussed,
>
> I look forward to attempting to assist, though I'm unclear on the 'I
> made some attempts to run VirtualBox, but have not successful' bit.
>
> Just a brief bit of meta-commentary:
>
> Public mailing list forums have many virtues, but suffer a
> (metaphorical) attention deficit, alongside some social dysfunctions.

Yep, highly true ... I certainly remember the general discussion on list
about virtualization, and probably (mostly?) about VirtualBox, but as to
particulars of specific objectives and constraints of the person who started
the whole thread, and what exactly their objectives and reasons are ...
I think that's mostly faced from the short-term memory storage in  
wetware.  ;-)

> What I'm suggesting is that your problem _should_ have been solvable in
> this forum many weeks if not months ago, but foundered on a small lack
> of clarity, lack of focus, deficiency of collective memory, and the
> tendency of forums like this one to barrage people with random
> suggestions from well-intentioned people not necessarily cognizant of
> the full context.

What, who, me, random suggestions?  :-)

> I kept observing people barging into the ongoing conversation and
> attempting to help you without a clear grasp of what you were doing and
> why, so it's not even a tiny bit surprising that these interactions

In general, also good if OP includes or continues to include key
objective/constraint information in response postings ... possibly
even concisely summarizing it and moving it up within the text ...
lest folks otherwise forget - or it get buried way down in the
weeds/details of *long* posting with lots of trails of older
quoted stuff included.  Oh, and another general (and often slightly
more "modern") point/tip/suggestion.  Including relevant context is
good - as also, is trimming out excess data from earlier that
no longer material contributes or is no longer relevant.

> Michael Paoli is certainly correct in his 'Hey, if you can't make it
> work with VirtualBox, you might be able to do it with KVM' (paraphrased)
> observation, and I mean absolutely no criticism in saying this, but that
> distracts from the question of why on God's green earth VirtualBox
> doesn't run just fine.

Hey, good intentions are ... at least that.  :-)

>>    - I ran the VMware program to make the vmdk file and copied it to a
>>    big USB SSD

Suitable backups, pretty much *always* a good thing.  Testing them - if not
100% all the time, at least enough statistically, to have high assurance
that one can also restore from backups, also quite important - and don't
forget in that, not just data, but entire procedures in reasonably probable
recovery scenarios (e.g. I once remember a certain group doing such an
exercise - in the scenario they were given, they found one glitch - they
no longer had key to open box on locked box of tapes ... they busted the
box open and were able to restore fine ... and ... adjusted the procedures
(switched to changeable combination lock and redundancy in persons
possessing combination, and tracking and occasional updating of
combination, and having all the tracking and management of that)).

VirtualBox ... Debian ...
If one's running stable, this is relevant if one's not seen it:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2016/msg00280.html
"Of course" qemu-kvm doesn't suffer that issue/problem.  ;-)
Does, however, look like newer VirtualBox is present in
backports.

>>    - And installed Debian Testing onto the laptop.

Ah, well, Testing wouldn't have that (same) security support issue.

>>    - There is a big partition with a copy of the vmdk file.
>>    - I made some attempts to run VirtualBox, but have not successful.
>
> And this is where we are.  If I understand correctly, we've actually
> been here for quite some time, but nobody's addressed whatever the
> problem is.

There's always this lovely document:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

And, by way of counter-example [bits of substituted text]:
Can someone take a look at the [bloody Microsoft smart quotes][not
exactly the command they ran][bloody Microsoft smart quotes] command
output for [incorrect hostname that doesn't exist] server. It seems to
have an odd output when ran. Please let me know if any questions or
concerns regarding this request.

Yeah, that'd be quite the example of how *not* to ask.  Some of it's
omissions/errors:
* failed to correctly provide name of host (highly relevant in that
   case)
* failed to provide actual command run
* failed to provide output of command or output of relevant section
   claimed to be incorrect or odd
* failed to provided comparative example/description of what was
   expected
* failed to provided relevant informational context, in addition to
   above, when run, id run under, pathname of command, any relevant
   environmental information (current directory, umask, ulimit values,
   environment, etc.)
* failed to provide any information of what they'd done and/or not done
   to attempt to isolate or correct the (claimed) issue

>>    - Others have suggested KVM and possibly others.
:-)