David Wright writes:
On Sun 16 Jun 2019 at 14:17:21 (-0500), Richard Owlett wrote: > On 06/16/2019 11:03 AM, David Wright wrote: > > On Sat 15 Jun 2019 at 08:15:24 (-0500), Richard Owlett wrote: > > > On 06/14/2019 06:10 AM, Richard Owlett wrote:
[...]
> > > My solution is install Grub only on the initial install and NO > > > boot loader on subsequent install. After completing one (or more) > > > additional installs, I boot the first install and run update-grub. > > > > > > VM's had been suggested ;} > > > > What for; to avoid having to type <down><down><down><return> when booting? > > No Then what *would* be the benefit of a VM? Why did you bring it up in this thread? > require my failures to be deterministic !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! > > VM's are intrinsically unknown quantities.
[...] Just a few benefits of VMs I can think of here: * Do multiple installs simulateneously. * Use the same machine to read manuals, mailing list or whatever while at the same time running an install. * No need to worry about the other installations in terms of (1) storage management: all installations get their own individual partition table inside an image file and (2) bootloader management: all installations see only their own data, there is no unwanted interaction between any of the installations. * Historically, VMs were sometimes emulated and thus slower than operating a system "bare-metal". On my systems, installations in VMs are often faster than installations on the machine directly because they can make use of caching (e.g. for installation media which need not be provided as physical media but can be image files as well), libvirt has its own DHCP to provide IP addresses quickly etc. such that systems inside it respond faster to certain installation tasks like getting an IP address over DHCP. * Snapshots can be used to save and revert any state of a VM which is perfectly well-suited for doing experiments and reverting to a "known good" state later if only to refine the experiment and run it again. This may save the time of doing an installation repeatedly in some cases. * VM management software allows all VMs to be named individually which may be an improvement over a lot of similar bootloader entries. * Deleting installations is very easy and does in no way interact with other existing installations (no need to update bootloader entries). Also, followup installations in VMs are not restricted by the partition layout from previous installations but each installation is only limited by amount of available disk space. * Different exclusive technology like partitioning schemes (GPT/MBR) or LVM may be used on some and not necessarily all of the installations without issues. In case of physical installations, experimenting with GPT+MBR at the same time is very difficult or requires multiple hard drives. Other ideas * https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/reasons-start-using-virtual-machine/ * https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-benefits-of-VM-Virtual-Machines Btw. at least one of the links recommends VirtualBox. I would rather prefer Virt-Manager + KVM (see https://masysma.lima-city.de/37/how_to_transition_from_virtualbox_to_kvm.xhtml for reasons). HTH Linux-Fan
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