What is the best distro for my business manager?

Tim Chase blinux.list at thechases.com
Sat Nov 24 13:49:32 UTC 2012


On 11/23/12 23:04, marbux wrote:
> one fact: WinXP runs like cold molasses in Virtual Box, even with
> 3 GB of fast RAM devoted exclusively to it on a fast quad-core
> CPU.

Is your CPU and Linux configuration set up to take advantage of
virtualization?  There's a CPU flag for both AMD and Intel that
indicates that the CPU supports virtualization, making it leaps and
bounds faster.  You can check with

  egrep '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

If it returns a result, your CPU supports it.  Mine doesn't,
unfortunately, so running virtual images is dog slow.

Also, I believe there's a kernel build that adds extra support for
virtual machines (on my Debian box, there are
"linux-image-{openvz,zen,vserver}" kernels) that give hooks to
virtual machines to speed them up.

> Dual-boot is a maddening configuration because of a permutation of
> Murphy's Law: What you want to do next seemingly always requires
> rebooting the system to access the other OS.

Oh, so true and elegantly expressed.  I tried dual-boot for about a
month and was infuriated by the Murphy's Law aspect of it, so I just
backed up my data and went pure Linux.

-tim





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