[clug-talk] Virtual machines

[terr at terralogic.net]

I have set up multi-boot and virtual machines before and I'm looking to do this again.  I'm most interested in minimal hardware... as in can this be done from a low end netbook like say an ASUS eeePC.


There is some choice with regard to processors and I see the atom porcessors seem to not support the virtualized instructions Intel offers on some more expensive and faster and obvioulsy more capable CPUs.


Can we still successfully run a virtual machine - say with VMWare or Virtual Box or perhaps something OSS?  If we can what do we lose?


What do we gain with a more capable CPU?


last time I did this was in the last century and on a 233 mHz pentium (I or II - I dont recall) I was able to run Linux w/ Oracle and and NT in a VM.  It worked fine.  

Now I see something like an Atom 1.6 GHz should run about as fast as a 2+ GHs Pentium 4 so I would think even such a low power system should be a candidate for a very decent testbed... I'm not looking for gaming... but I probably will want compilers.


I'm also interested in OSX and I see apparently the ASUS 900 series is pretty compatible... but I know next to nothing about this.


OS's I want to run include NT, possibly newer winders but not necessarily.  I'm not a winders fan anyways.  OSX and maybe even an old DOS machine so I can run some old software and not bother with a port!  The old software includes a serial I/F for a calcomp plotter.  It would be nice to use it again.  Of course I can port this to Linux if I really want.  But that old Calcomp code is about as ugly as it gets!


Suggestions are really welcome.  If we want we can put the boot images onto a USB or whatever and a USB boot / Live USB makes sense to me.


My host system will _probably_ end up being Ubuntu.