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On 14/06/10 22:07, Roland Tarver wrote:
Thanks for the advice. My plan sounds like an un-necessary hassle, lol! I will do as you do and get an old computer for the task. Just need to get through all the uni work and then I _really_ want to give Debian a spin...... Thank you :-) Roly
If you've got a reasonable spec machine (Pentium 4, Athlon 64 or higher) and a reasonable amount of memory (1GB or higher, 2GB upwards preferably) then you might want to give something like Virtualbox a try. There is either an open source version (virtualbox-ose in the Ubuntu repositories) or a Personal Use (i.e. for personal users) version available (the Personal Use version supports plugging in USB devices and a couple of other features).
With VirtualBox you can run different distros in their own virtual PC without having to have a spare machine handy or dual boot. The virtual PC's hard drive is stored as a file on the hard drive and the memory is shared with the main PC memory (basically you allocate an amount of memory to the virtual PC, say 512MB and also some memory to the virtual video card). Then choose to boot from an ISO image, Floppy image, network or physical media (could be floppy drive or CD drive).
As far as the OS in the virtual machine is concerned, it's running on a standard PC. Speedwise it isn't bad, it helps if you have a quicker PC with the virtualisation extensions in the processor (most newish AMD desktop processors have this, not sure about notebook CPUs, some Intel CPUs have it and some don't) but even on an older P4 machine with 1GB ram it should run reasonably well (I have about 3 servers virtualized on my P4 3Ghz server with 2GB Ram).
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html