Ubuntu Inside: The Next Virtual Server
The next move is to 6.0.6 LTS. Here are some points:
- The VMWare Player alone takes up too much memory compared to Virtual PC 2004.
- songhay6lxv should mount one or all home directories on a separate virtual hard drive.
- The Gnome Partition Editor looks like great help for Gnome—but not much help for a server.
- The useradd command might be needed here as well as mount.
- This article for BSD people may help: “How to move home directory.”Instead of using Linux to achieve this design goal, another option is using a Virtual PC Differencing disk. However, this statement in the Virtual Disk Wizard is not very reassuring:
After you create the differencing virtual hard disk, any modifications to the parent virtual hard disk will cause the differencing hard disk to become invalid.
What’s the list of “modifications” that will “cause” this potential catastrophe? According to “TNT1-155: A Technical Overview of Microsoft Virtual PC SP1,” the guidance is to make the parent disk read only. Ultimately, in “Some tips on using Virtual PC 2004,” Minh T. Nguyen writes:
Don’t use differencing virtual hard disks for something you project to be rather big. I have a “base” Windows XP SP2 virtual machine and hard disk, so that whenever I want to try out some new (and possibly instable) program, I create a new temporary virtual machine with a differencing virtual hard disk off the base WindowsXP one. This is fine for temporary and small programs, but when I installed Avalon CTP + Whidbey, the differencing hard disk was about 3.6 GB big, which is almost the same size as the Windows XP base and the guest OS ran really slow. Instead, just make a physical copy of the base virtual machine and hard disk, rename them if needed, and then take it from there. After doing that, my WindowsXP + Avalon CTP + Whidbey was “only” 4.2 GB big and ran significantly faster.