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

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 2/3/20 8:04 AM, Akkana Peck wrote:
> 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?

     I have one other distribution on the test machine and one other on 
the home machine.
On my home machine I wanted to see what Deepin looked like.  On the test 
machine I wanted
to check on changes to Mageia but on both machines I depend on 
PCLinuxOS64 to get my
work done.
     Under Mandriva years ago I used KDE's for getting work done but 
switch as was then possible to
the Gnome 2.4 and XFCE (I believe).  I found the tools inferior to the 
KDE of the time and
presently.

> 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.
     I am quite familiar with the Grub2 being over-written by the other
distributions installed.  Not so many years ago on my Delll E6430 i had
installed on the hard disk and booting somewhat unreliably about
5 distributions.
>
> 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

     Actually I have installed CentOS in previous versions onto the 
hardware and discovered that
as with most of the Red Hat sourced distributions since 
Mandrake/Mandriva failed that I do not
care for the Desktop Environment metaphor provided.  Since the DE 
controls the applications
it recognizes and supports I do not find the useful tools that I do in 
PCLinuxOS64 and in Mageia
under KDE's Plasma 5 (and in 3.9 and 4.x.x).
     So I will not be putting it on hardware.
     As soon as I figure out what is going on with Virtual Box or rather 
how I am failing to understand
what I am failing to do in VB I will try to install that 7+ GB file on 
either the machine I bring to the
meetings or the more powerful machine I keep at home to answer my mail, 
download iso files,
create bootable flash drives, keep my daily Journal, and play with 
various things.

     Bobbie