[sf-lug] (forw) Re: SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday 02022020

[Akkana Peck]

Rick Moen writes:
> > Have you ever considered doing test installations into a virtual machine
> > (say, under VirtualBox), on a laptop you bring with available disk space
> > for this purpose?

Bobbie replies (quoted by Rick):
>       Actually I did consider that but sadly am having a few problems with
> the attempts I have made so far.

Putting aside the discussion of why Virtualbox isn't working on
Bobbie's machine, though that's certainly worth pursuing ... why not
partition a machine with several root partitions, and actually
install distros onto the hardware?

So, for instance, your main distro is on /dev/sda1, with as much
disk space as you need. But then you make a couple other small
partitions, size maybe 15G (should be plenty to hold a newly
installed distro). When you boot from one of these installers to
test a new distro, don't let it touch sda1; instead, install
the whole thing to sda2 or sda3 or whatever. Then you get to test
how the distro actually runs, on live hardware, with no worries
about whether your CPU has virtualization extensions or whether
you have all the graphics acceleration running right in virtualbox.

The only tricky part is that grub2 is extremely bad at handling
multi-boot machines, so in most cases, the new distro will overwrite
your old grub2 setup and you'll have to do some fiddling to get back
to your main OS. But that's solvable: as long as you can boot the
main distro once -- and you can always keep a USB rescue stick
around that lets you do that -- you can run upgrade-grub or
equivalent from there.

Virtualbox is terrific and learning about it is worthwhile, but
installing on the actual hardware without a virtualization layer
might be easier and might give you the best idea of how each distro
works.

        ...Akkana