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Re: Light (hdd too) Distro for VirtualBox



On Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 11:42:42 PM UTC-7 Jason Marks wrote:
No worries.
It appears I've been too stingy with my VM hdd allocation. Due to fear of running out of hdd space on the host, I ran out of space on the guest.
Lubuntu 18.04 VM apparently needs more than the 10GB I allocated. Hit that limit running updates today. Expanding it doesn't feel worth it to me. (Interestingly this is the one that I cloned/have a living backup of!)
Still pondering the lightweight replacement. My one foray w/ Arch was ArchBang a few years ago and I successfully (natively) installed it to a 2GB keydrive! Guess those days are gone, but they were different anyway. But I never really felt comfortable w/ Arch.
Anyway, the neat thing about my dilemma is that by the time I am finally ready to replace the hdd w/ an ssd, it'll be cheaper and or bigger. ;o)

Jason,
IMNSHO, another matter to consider from the get-go on the initial installation of your host Linux distro is *How* you partition your "hdd space on the host".
Rick M has posted a relevant article written by a Karsten M. Self on his linuxmafia.com site touching on this point entitled "Linux Partitioning mini-FAQ", http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Linux/FAQs/partition.html

Perhaps it's  obvious, but you seriously may wish to plan for future Linux-distro installations on allocating much more diskspace dedicated for your /home partition to accommodate the Lubuntu 18.04 VM and any other VM's you wish to use in your desired scenario(s).  Here's an example of one such scenario, and even using something like Karsten M Self's "minimal partitioning: boot, root, swap..." on a relatively low-capacity 250 GB hdd (either spinning-platters -or- SSD):

0.5 GB /boot (distro-single system with extra space for a limited number of additional Linux kernels and initrd's)
30 GB /<root> (yep, that's less than 52 GB)
16 GB swap (assuming that physRAM is 16 GB?)
160 GB+ /home (rest of hdd; really!)
This way, that dedicated 160 GB+ /home partition can accommodate a handful or so of VM guests with a bit of extra diskspace for /home/<user> configurations+settings+other files,  assuming for the sake of argument that each VM is expandable to 30 GB maximum :-)

Further thoughts on that from Rick M, Michael P, and others?

-A

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