[sf-lug] Virtual meeting notes for Sun 10/3/2021, pair of own suggestions

[aaronco36]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com> from [01]:
> Victor needs help with setting up a dual boot machine with a programming
> environment running in a virtual machine if I understood him correctly.

...and much further along...
> Aaron had shared a few current references with us and I am sure will be 
happy to do so here.


Glad to oblige however belatedly ;-)

There was also some discussion of using KNOPPIX [02] for Victor's needs. 
Conveniently, the head KNOPPIX maintainer Klaus Knopper released the CD 
version of KNOPPIX v9.1 back in February of this year; see [03] and [04]
Specific benefits of the KNOPPIX v9.1 liveCD include
- ability to function on a wider range of optical drives other than solely 
DVD
- ability to boot on fairly low-spec i386 and amd64 hardware
- useful wide gamut of utility, systems administration, and 
developmental/programming tools (a veritable Swiss Army Knife liveCD!)

As far as "setting up a dual boot machine with a programming environment 
running in a virtual machine", IMHO, Victor's best bet would be to first 
install Debian GNU/Linux[05] as a virtualbox machine (see references [06] 
and [07]) in whatever Windows version he's currently using.  Since Victor 
is apparently also familiar with Lightweight Xfree86 Qt desktop 
environment Ubuntu (LXQt Ubuntu, a.k.a. Lubuntu[08]), it makes good sense 
to similarly use by default Debian's lightweight LXQt desktop for the 
Debian virtualbox machine.
Specific benefits of installing Debian at least include
- its incredible versatility on a wide range of hardware and using various 
available hardware resources
- its many available software packages, including most if not all major 
programming environments a.k.a., Integrated Development Environments 
(IDE's)
- its compatibility with Debian-derived Ubuntu as well as other 
Debian-based and Ubuntu-based distros -- "If it works in Debian, then 
it'll certainly work in Ubuntu"

After Victor and others become more comfortable with using Debian in a 
virtual machine, then IMNSHO, it might be best to install Debian alongside 
Windows as a dual-booting system; see [09] and [10].  One of the main 
reasons for dual-booting as opposed to running Debian virtually is that 
there is host resource overhead required (e.g., RAM) in running a virtual 
machine such as Debian within a host system, and this host resource 
overhead slows down its virtual machines' performance.  Such is not the 
case when only a single OS boots and can load on so-to-speak "bare metal".

As shown in reference [11] for installing dual-boot Ubuntu with Windows 
installed first, there are several preparatory steps before Linux (in this 
case, Debian) can be installed alongside.  On the hard drive with the 
pre-existing Windows OS, Victor and others should _most certainly_ backup 
as many Windows data files/documents as possible to good external media 
from within Windows, perform disk(s) cleanup, and then perform a complete 
defragmentation of all Windows partitions. Once files are successfully 
backed up, the Windows partition(s) are as cleaned-up as possible, and all 
Windows partitions are entirely defragmented, then Victor and others can 
reboot their Windows machines using the KNOPPIX v9.1 CD from [04] (or its 
liveUSB equivalent) and then proceed to run KNOPPIX's excellent GNOME 
Partition Editor GParted[12] to make suffient diskspace available for the 
eventual dual-boot installation of Debian.  Note that the author in 
reference [11] recommends creating 100-150 Gb of free Hard Disk space for 
this dual-boot install of Linux, "although anything above 40 Gb would do 
the job".

Hope that this helps and further suggestions/comments from others most 
certainly welcome :-)

-Aaron

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REFERENCES
=================================================================
[01]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2021q4/015401.html 
[02]https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=knoppix 
[03]https://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix910-en.html 
[04]https://mirrors.sonic.net/knoppix/knoppix-cd/ 
[05]https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian 
[06]https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html#installation_windows 
[07]https://www.wikihow.com/Install-Debian-in-Virtualbox 
[08]https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=lubuntu 
[09]https://wiki.debian.org/DualBoot/Windows 
[10]https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dual_boot_with_Windows 
[11]https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/creating-a-dual-boot-system-with-linux-and-windows/ 
[12]https://gparted.org/ 
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aaronco36 at sdf.org
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