I am running ubuntu karmic 32 bit in 64 bit openSUSE 11.2 KDE

openSUSE 11.2 KDE4.3.1 is awesome, extremely fast and very beautiful. I started loving it. Neither can I miss my favorite ubuntu , nor can I miss openSUSE 11.2 KDE 4.3 after getting a feel of its speed, power and beauty. So here is what I did and I am not that good in explaining how I configure. But let me try explaining thinking the reader in second person

If you have a core 2 duo or a quad core PC you need not miss either! Why? Because core 2 duo or quad core processors are coming with hardware virtualization. By default hardware virtualization is disabled in bios. If it is disabled you can enable it in bios. Hardware virtualization makes the guest OS run with near native speed. see X86 Virtualization in wikipedia

I installed openSUSE 11.2 and consider it as a powerful host for hosting guest OSes. As the kernel is very much optimized for desktop use, virtue of  64 bit openSUSE 11.2 kernel with 1000Hz frequency ( unlike ubuntu karmic 64 bit which is 100Hz frequency kernel and that is the main reason I dumped 64 bit ubuntu)

I installed virtualbox-ose, and using virtualbox I have ubuntu karmic running as a guest OS. virtualbox-ose has two parts host and guest

host is the OS which is powerful enough and can host other OS on top of itself, guest is any OS which should be able to run in virtualmachine. ubuntu 32 bit felt light on top of virtualbox and it is a good guest OS

Host

The powerful openSUSE 11.2 with 1000 Hz frequency kernel is my host. To install virtualbox in openSUSE 11.2 is just a click away. Goto yast and install it, suse will resolve all dependencies. Or if wanted to do it command line it can be done as follows

sudo zypper install virtualbox-ose virtualbox-ose-kmp-desktop

Guest

By default after installing ubuntu ran well, but graphics acceleration was not good . So I installed guest additions from the virtualbox menu (Devices --> Install Guest Additions)

Then rebooted and now ubuntu ran well as a guest

Here are the screenshots for your enjoyment (if you view this from a tabbed browser, right click the following images and open in new tab to get a full view)

 

Here is the virtualbox settings I configured as an image

I ticked the following in system menu while configuring

1. Enable ACPI

2. Enable IO APIC

3. Enable PAE/NX

4. Enable VT-x/AMD-v

5. Enable Nested Paging

and ticked enable 3d acceleration in display menu while configuring

and I configured networking as bridged

Why virtualbox?

Because, virtualbox has a open source edition and it offers 3d acceleration in guest OS, kudos Sun Microsystem for such a great product


To look further, there are numerous articles about virtualization in internet. To get virtualbox with full USB support, download and install it from virtualbox.org instead of installing ose edition from repository