Re: [ccp4bb] System virtual machine recommendation for crystallography?

[Roger Rowlett]

I'm using VirtualBox 2.2.2 to run a Ubuntu 9.04 on WinXP (32 bit) as a testbed for migrating my lab servers/workstations from Fedora 8. It runs surprisingly well with 512 Mbyte of assigned memory and 64 Mbyte of assigned graphics memory. I have even used it to test Wine to run some Win-only crystallography software within Ubuntu within WinXP (!) with very good performance on a dual core 2.4 GHz machine with 2 Gbyte total memory. The only thing you will not get in the virtual machine is accelerated graphics performance. If you are expecting to run Coot or Pymol in a virtual machine, forget it. (However, it does work, and I can get about 15 frames/sec with the non-native graphics. It's certainly usable, if a bit slow.) What you can do is set up share folders so that you can open files in Vista and get native graphics performance in your favorite graphical applications. VMWare is snappier, but VirtualBox is free. Cheers, Roger Rowlett Andy Torelli wrote: Hello everyone, I would like to install a system virtual machine to run Ubuntu Linux as a guest OS on a 32-bit Vista laptop. The idea is to allow occasional use of crystallographic refinement programs while I'm away from lab. The laptop has an Intel Core 2 duo processor (2.0 GHz) and 3 GB RAM. There are popular software programs available (VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox, etc.), but is anyone aware of any considerations that would make one better for the above purposes? For example, will one offer easy control over distributing hardware resources to prevent crippling Vista while running refinement within the guest Linux? My Google and CCP4bb searches have not turned up anything so far. Thanks in advance for any advice or reference material. I will post a summary e-mail as well. Best Regards, -Andy Torelli -- Roger S. Rowlett Professor Colgate University Presidential Scholar Department of Chemistry Colgate University 13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346 tel: (315)-228-7245 ofc: (315)-228-7395 fax: (315)-228-7935 email: rrowl...@mail.colgate.edu