I'm not claiming running it in a VM is ideal; however, it's often
necessary (a lot of people want to try an OS before installing it on
hardware; others don't want to commit to beta software). In short,
hardware installation is simply out of the question for a lot of people.
If you'd like to write up an alternative virtualization solution, I'd
be happy to link to it on my blog.
As a side note, running the VM in fullscreen mode means you don't have
to hover over said 1px stripe to show the dock. And I don't believe
I've had such graphics problems with other OSes in VirtualBox--while I
don't doubt VirtualBox's drivers are crappy, it looks like some of the
problem is on Luna's implementation (of course, this is perfectly
acceptable as Virtualbox isn't a supported target).
On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 12:09 PM, Sergey Shnatsel Davidoff
ser...@elementaryos.org wrote:
Unfortunately VirtualBox is not a great choice because of its really,
really poor GPU passthrough drivers that can cause all sorts of
random issues, including crashes:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=OTk5Mw
Running Luna in virtual machines is not a great idea in general
because it's just not designed for such use. For example, using the
dock in a VM is a PITA because you have to hover a 1px stripe, which
is tricky. Also VirtualBox has very slow 2D acceleration, so the dock
is slow to show up too even if you manage to reveal it.
And any VM drivers are really slow at OpenGL, so Gala animations are
laggy, window management in general is laggy even if you disable
animations, and VirtualBox drivers show all kinds of nasty artifacts
too.
So, if you don't mind unusable window management (e.g. you always use
one window), you can try running Luna in a VM, but please use
something other than VirtualBox. In fact, Parallels GPU drivers are
crap as well (proprietary and even worse than VirtualBox) and
QEMU/KVM doesn't have guest GPU drivers, so the only VM in which Luna
is usable (in single-window mode, because window management is b0rked
either way) is VMware.
If you want usable window management, you can try running Luna in
fullscreen mode in QEMU/KVM or Xen with GPU passthrough to guest, but
that's tricky to set up and I can't see any advantages of this setup
over an actual installation.
Oh, and there's also the option to hack out Gala and replace it with
something that does compositing in software. But in that case you're
not really running Luna.
2013/6/23 Craig Weber webe...@gmail.com
I made a brief write up on using VirtualBox to virtualize Luna. My
primary purpose is to increase exposure to Luna, particularly to
those less-technical users; however, it could also be useful for
those looking to create a clean development environment without fear
of breaking their production environment.
I wrote this up because I experienced a lot of issues with
installing/configuring a Luna VM, and I want others to benefit from
my experiences. Please feel free to read this/share it with anyone
who may find it useful:
http://craigmatthewweber.com/2013/06/23/running-elementaryos-in-virtualbox-under-ubuntu-13-04/
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Sergey Shnatsel Davidoff
OS architect @ elementary
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