Hacker News Reader

Comment by moonchrome | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like the idea of 200$ dev machines for students if they already have working laptops by far the easiest and uniform solution would be to distribute virtual box images, have students install virtual box and develop inside that, even that cheap Acer would be enough to run a ruby dev virtual box.

You can even install all ruby gems, packages and w/e you need for the class before you distribute it for convenience.

View on HN

Virtualization is a bit of a flawed solution - I have had issues trying to virtualize Ubuntu on my Windows 8 desktop (my gaming machine) that would drive me nuts, and would be far worse for students just entering web development.

It is still too fragile IMO.

Hmm, fragile in what way? For me, VMware Player has had only a couple minor hiccups in several years, and even VirtualBox has been (buggier but) very usable. (My machines are non-gaming.)

I had breaking issues like Unity crashing on a fresh VM install of Ubuntu.

You can actually install Linux with Hyper-V. I use Windows 8 Pro x64 much of the time at home and have a Debian VM set up with Hyper-V. Though, I do not use a desktop, I just SSH into it for development. Plus side is you can keep a 512MB VM running all the time without caring if it's consuming resources that way.

I've worked with different virtualization tools on different machines, the biggest hassle is configuring the image which is done once by the teacher - once it's set up it's really easy to distribute it and then it should work identically on all clients assuming they installed the software and image correctly.

Just don't install Ubuntu on this :). Your students will cry in despair every time their VM will freeze because of Unity. I suppose this is because Unity needs a 3D accelerated graphical card and the VirtualBox emulation doesn't provide all it needs.

Linux Mint with the Mate desktop runs smoothly on cheap Windows hosts.

How on earth did it not occur to you to use a different desktop on Ubuntu, if Unity is causing you such problems?

Do you seriously have to install a different distribution merely in order to switch the desktop you use?

Do you also switch distributions in order to use a different browser or shell?

I suppose you know Mint is basically Ubuntu repackaged and with a different default window manager.

I'm more interested in keeping my productivity up than in experimenting with installing various window mangers in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu caused me problems only when I run it in a VM. If you install Ubuntu on a decent physical machine it will run OK.

    sudo apt-get install -y xubuntu-desktop
    sudo apt-get install -y lubuntu-desktop

Give me a little while, I think I've exceeded my experimentation quota for today

Thanks.

Your commands installs the alternative window managers alongside Unity ? Or they replace Unity ?

Replaces Unity.

Here's a few to check out: http://askubuntu.com/questions/65083/what-different-desktop-...

Even if it works smoothly - and you need a better laptop for this than many poor students have, no 300$ netbooks and such, it still eats your battery which can be bad if you are in a university with a shortage on power outlets like mine and have a old machine with a bad battery.

I'm a little worried about performance with VirtualBox and a machine with 2gb of RAM and a little over a Ghz of processing power - just judging by what I've seen trying to use VirtualBox over the years on more powerful systems. But it has made some great strides in performance so maybe it's time to look into it again! I do agree with some of the other commenters also who are worried about ease of use for the students.

There is no way you could run, in a VM, the latest Ubuntu smoothly on a low spec Windows host. You could use a less demanding Ubuntu derivative Linux that doesn't need a 3D accelerated graphical card.

There we go. Somebody commented on my post itself saying I should try Mint!

I ran Ubuntu 12 or so on a 2GB C2D MacBook with lion and an SSD. Not too bad.

Yes you can. As others have pointed out, it the DE that uses most system resources. For common development task you don't need 3D gimmick. You can install lightweight DE like LXDE or XFCE. I use Xubuntu in my home pc and installed it as a Virtualbox guest in my office pc allocating 1.5GB of RAM. Things have been buttery smooth. For a comparison of system resources used by different DEs see the article http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201109/page08.html. The article is a bit old but still relevant.

I haven't done it in a while but I did run virtualBox on a linux host and WinXP guest back on my old EEE PC 1000 - 1GB netbook with 1GB ram and Atom CPU.

I mean we aren't talking about creating a functional desktop here, all they need is a image that boots runs a text editor and has all the ruby packages pre installed - you don't even run heavy weight IDE like eclipse - this should easily be doable with ~512MB ram image.

But I agree and Ubuntu might not be the best choice of distro for this, especially with that unity monster.

I've managed to run Win XP guest in virtualbox years back on Eee PC Atom with 1GB ram, ran good enough for me to install drivers and configure it.

I don't think it should be a problem for students, all they need to do is install virtualbox (double-click installer on windows) and import the VM image (running a GUI wizard). I've done this before at a company I worked, new office building had Macs and OSX but needed to use some proprietary Windows app for parts of work so I deployed VBox and along with a preconfigured WinXP image to every machine. Nice part of virtualization is the hardware is virtualized so the image should work exactly the same across all computers, no hassle with hardware support unlike using bootable images.

Just find some lightweight distro that's easy to configure and is supported by virtualbox guest drivers.

Sounds pretty decent - I remember playing around with the EeePC years ago! I unfortunately crushed mine with a school book...sad story. I do remember it not being very powerful at all but if you think you could get WinXP guest running on it, I'm sure I could get a lightweight Linux distro running quite easily. I'll have to take a look.

in my experience, when I ask students to use a VM, I find out that (a) their HDs are already full of crap (music movies, crapware) and/or (b) the bare metal is not fast enough, or not enough RAM, to run a VM well. There is a certain appeal to forcing them to have a dedicated physical machine.

Yep.

And if you have virtualbox, just make an image with a host only IP, and point them to that IP - problem solved!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com