Fwd: Which OS to install?

[Russell Gadd <russ.mail.lists@gmail.com>]

On 16 December 2010 08:14,  <teddieeb@tmo.blackberry.net> wrote:
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> One thing I may suggest is look into the use of virtual machines for something like this. You can install and run the OS of your choosing in a window ontop of your main system,
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> This has the advantages of sandboxing your experiments, having access to your running and stable normal environment at the same time as experimenting, and save hard disk space in unfilled partitions.
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> It also won't affect your stable installs should something go terribly wrong.
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> Your main disadvantage is your essentially running two OS's at the same time so eats ram resources like crazy, and may not be an effective true test of system intensive programs given the weight of all the extra stuff on the proc.
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> Oricle's Virtual Box is a good simple to use Virtulization software if your interested.
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> Hope it helps;
> TeddyB

I have in mind to look into virtualisation sometime but at present I
am up to speed with multibooting. I take snapshots (compressed images)
of the partitions so I can recover a borked system easily. I use
BootitNG (learnt this when I was only using Windows) and it works very
well. When running any OS it can't see the main partitions of the
other OS's (they appear as unused disc space). I have a common data
partition on which I store the images (amongst other stuff). Also disc
space is abundant as I don't have much in the way of music or video.

My intention to try virtualisation is more to do with security -
running a browser in an effective sandbox. If I use a new OS for my
project I can still access the rest of its facilities e.g. use the
internet. Switching to using my PC for other purposes does require a
reboot but I'm not planning to try to do anything else whilst I'm
playing with this project.

Also I have a slight concern about how effective the virtualisation
sandboxing would be against some flaw in memory management due to
errors in my coding changes

Anyway thanks for your thoughts, appreciate the ideas.