elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

["Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff" <sergey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Unfortunately VirtualBox is not a great choice because of its really,
really poor GPU passthrough drivers that can cause all sorts of random
issues, including crashes:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTk5Mw

Running Luna in virtual machines is not a great idea in general because
it's just not designed for such use. For example, using the dock in a VM is
a PITA because you have to hover a 1px stripe, which is tricky. Also
VirtualBox has very slow 2D acceleration, so the dock is slow to show up
too even if you manage to reveal it.
And any VM drivers are really slow at OpenGL, so Gala animations are laggy,
window management in general is laggy even if you disable animations, and
VirtualBox drivers show all kinds of nasty artifacts too.

So, if you don't mind unusable window management (e.g. you always use one
window), you can try running Luna in a VM, but please use something other
than VirtualBox. In fact, Parallels GPU drivers are crap as well
(proprietary and even worse than VirtualBox) and QEMU/KVM doesn't have
guest GPU drivers, so the only VM in which Luna is usable (in single-window
mode, because window management is b0rked either way) is VMware.

If you want usable window management, you can try running Luna in
fullscreen mode in QEMU/KVM or Xen with GPU passthrough to guest, but
that's tricky to set up and I can't see any advantages of this setup over
an actual installation.

Oh, and there's also the option to hack out Gala and replace it with
something that does compositing in software. But in that case you're not
really running Luna.


2013/6/23 Craig Weber <weberc2@xxxxxxxxx>

> I made a brief write up on using VirtualBox to virtualize Luna. My primary
> purpose is to increase exposure to Luna, particularly to those
> less-technical users; however, it could also be useful for those looking to
> create a clean development environment without fear of breaking their
> production environment.
>
> I wrote this up because I experienced a lot of issues with
> installing/configuring a Luna VM, and I want others to benefit from my
> experiences. Please feel free to read this/share it with anyone who may
> find it useful:
>
>
> http://craigmatthewweber.com/2013/06/23/running-elementaryos-in-virtualbox-under-ubuntu-13-04/
>
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-- 
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff
OS architect @ elementary