VMWare on netbook

I am looking to wipe the OS on my netbook to install a very minimal system so that I can run VMWare Player (or similar) to run virtual machines.

Does anyone know what's best suited for an operating system to allow this? Since the netbook is limited on RAM, I don't want the base OS to hog it all.

Thanks in advance.

 

You could try a few of those super-light distros like puppy or slitaz. I imagine that it might tough to get vmware running on one of those. I don't know.

Another option would be to do a minimal install of arch or debian (so you'd have access to their repositories) and then run it with fluxbox, icewm or openbox. Actually, now that I think about, crunchbang or archbang might be where I'd start.

 

may i ask why you are trying to run VMs on a netbook? it would be really slow as most atoms dont have vt tech so performance will be really hit.

 

I have read somewhere that VT-* doesn't necessary mean performance gain.

Though VM on notebook(let alone netbook) is not for performance anyway.

 

VT tech and amd's equivalent allows for better thread management and nesting of the threads, instead of a thread running in the VM software thread, it can go strait to the hardware. this takes away the extra overhead from running an OS in an OS, or well most of it.

now this helps with cpu based performance issues but not other areas such as ram and HDD IO, so it does not always seem to make it faster GUI wise as that has to load a lot of things form RAM and the HDD so the "Snappeness" of a bare metal install will most likely not be there but the processing power will see a big improvement.

now the OP's use of the VMs may not need this improved performance, it all depends.

To keep with the OP, ya try to use a bare minimal OS install, i would try VirtualBox, never used VMware player, only VMware workstation, but i have had great results with VitualBox.

 

Netbooks might not be the best choice, but if you're basically setting up a lightly worked dev environment they might work well enough. Maxed out memory, like the Aspire 722 can have a singel 4Gig stick, will help.

If you only need to run lots of linux images, then Xen which requires a bit more cooperation than most vm setups is lightweight and might be a good choice. if you need true full virtualization then KVM or VMware the two most common ones under Linux. I have no idea how the Windows 7 Premium built in virtualization (virtual pc I think it is) would work.

 

virtual PC works just fine on my core duo, so is virtualbox. even on the pentium M.

 

KVM needs to have VT tech and im sure atoms dont have that, dont know about xen, will have to look in to that.

I will say i did get Virtualbox running on an atom with a Ubuntu guest on a windows xp host, did it just for fun, wasn't that great of performance

 

I'd say give VMWare player a shot - check out and evaluate the performance for your usage patterns...

 

I got VirtualBox running ubuntu guest on a windows host(to do some programming. i like the environment isolation, and standardized start-environment)

and my programming brought me to testing WebOS SDK and emulator(which runs on VirtualBox)...

FUN

 

Even in 2009 there were some culv core2 netbooks that supported VT-x, you needed to check the specific cpu model because intel didn't follow a sensible pattern.

My old acer with a u2300 ran a couple vms for a virtual test network fine, memory seems to be the real limiter for casual use.

All fusion cpus support the identical amd-v (even the low power tablet version)