Ubuntu in a Virtual Machine

Hi, I'm buying a Sony Vaio SR 420 this week. Initially I planned on Dual booting my system, but instead I decided just to use a virtual machine (virtual box), despite never having done it before.

I only intend to use the VM to browse, use MATLAB, NX5 (a 3d cad program), and filesharing.

I would like to know a few things about running Ubuntu inside of a VM.

The SR 420 has an ATI card. I know that linux drivers hate ATI, but will this be a problem if the OS is running inside of a VM? How about other drivers?

Are there any complications with installing software to a virtual machine?

How do the power settings work? If Windows is set to turn off the monitor after an hour but Ubuntu is set to turn it off after 45 minutes, will Ubuntu take precedence, or are power settings disabled in a VM?

How much will using a VM affect my systems resources? Will I be able to run MATLAB and Firefox in Linux and Foobar in windows without taxing the system's resources and battery?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

A VM completely abstracts the graphics interface, so you won't have any problems with that. Besides, ATI graphics are much better supported as of late... Ubuntu 9.10 has native, open-source drivers for all ATI chips, with full 3D support for the X1xxx and older chips.

No, there aren't any complications with installing software. Just remember that 3D support won't be amazingly fast.

Power settings, the Windows settings will take precedence. The Ubuntu settings will only work within the virtual machine.

As for system resources, you need to allocate another system's entire RAM for the virtual machine... you need the memory for Linux plus all the other programs you want to run in it. For MATLAB and Firefox, I would recommend using no less than 768MB of RAM, ideally 1.5GB or more. But that depends on how much RAM your laptop will have in it.

I think you need to learn a bit more about what a " virtual machine" means. It's like running an entire computer within software. It is completely separate from the "host" OS, or Windows in your case.

 

Thanks, you told me exactly what I needed to hear. I have little/no clue on how to run and set up a virtual machine, but I'm more than willing to learn on my own. I've been dual booting since Feisty and I'm kind of set in my ways. The only reason I've even considered running a VM is at the suggestion of an acquaintance when I made an offhand comment about being sick of having to restart to switch Operating Systems.

Considering I'll have 4GB of RAM (expandable to 8GB), I would imagine that I'll have more than enough memory to run a VM as long as I don't want to play a game at the same time.

 

You should be fine with 4GB. I run Windows as a virtual machine under Linux with VirtualBox all the time, as well as multiple other Linux guest OS's when I'm playing around.

 

One last thing Pitabred, I'm gonna pretend I didn't see your sig...

Any differences with running KDE instead of Gnome? I've been running GNOME since Feisty, maybe it's time for a change. KDE is pretty.

 

Not a huge difference. They both use similar amounts of RAM, it mostly depends on what default applications you want to use. The only thing that I can see being a problem is that KDE uses hardware acceleration any more, so it may not be quite as fast feeling in a VM as Gnome. But I don't know for sure.