Lightest Linux

looking for an OS to run virtualbox or vmware on, consitering java based os... what would others recomend... I need support for hardware with virtual machine support.... wandering does a 64bit os run a 32bit virtual machine faster than a 32 bit os

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There isn't really an obvious answer to your question about which distro will run virtuabox / vmware the lightest (fastest?) because at the end of the day, if you install a heave app, you no longer have the a light distro. The weight of a distro is defined as much as anything else as what it's running.

That said, there are some distros which will be more lightweight "out of the box" in that they take care to minimise the number of default background processes. My choice would be xubuntu because it aims to hit the "lightweight desktop" while still allowing access to a full range of repositories for whatever softwares you want to include.

Friends of mine would recommend Fedora, just because that's what they like using. It would be good - provided you installed a light weight Desktop Environment such as Fluxbox.

I'm not sure whether 64bit machines would run 32 bit emulation faster... not an area I've probed much. I would imagine no, because it means they are restricted to making 32 bit calls.

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A 64-bit os is easily handling huge memories because it's able to handle two 32-bit words in a single instruction.
If you have a small-memory application, you don't really need 64-bits OS.
If your memory is smaller than 4gig you don't need a 64-bit OS.
And if you need to emulate a 64-bit OS on a 32-bit machine, you need to translate your one-64-bit-word into two-32-bit-words on your real hardware 32-bit machine, you gain nothing.
In order to give you a more precise answer, we need to know what you do really want to need with your vmware machine. is it a database server ?
If it's a server only, for instance, you don't need graphics running on it. So, you can install a Linux box and work in ascii-only mode, without X, this will save memory and cpu-power. You run the Cygwin graphics server on your own PC and you use "xterm" from your server fired from a putty sessio.

 

 

 

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Its hard to tell what the op intends on doing, but if he was wanting to run multiple virtual servers on the one box, Xen or Virtuozzo along with something solid like Redhat/Centos would give a strong foundation for running multiple servers on the one box. As for the question of 64 vrs 32 bits, unless you are crunching huge numbers, the average server running a LAMP stack is never going to see any benefits from one or the other, adding more cores will give you noticeable gains, as well as more ram will give you more capacity of run more servers.

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In order to run 64-bit operating system, you MUST run it on a 64-bit machine. That means both the hardware and the host operating system MUST be in 64-bit mode.

That means if your operating system is for example Windows XP Professional, you CANNOT RUN 64-bit operating systems in a virtual machine even if your processor is 64-bit capable because you're running the processor in legacy mode (16/32 bit). If you are running your virtual machine on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, then you CAN run a 64-bit operating system in a virtual machine.

A 64-bit host operating system can run 32-bit guest operating system fine and without any penalties. So I'm not too sure what's your question...

As for wanting to run 64-bit operating system, do you have the need for one? If you have large applications and have 4 or more GB of RAM to be used, then you should jump onto the 64-bit bandwagon, else, little performance will be seen.

I run my system in full 64-bit environment because I have games that have 64-bit binary (esp. Crysis, it runs a lot better in 64-bit than 32-bit). Also, I want my programs to have a larger address space without being limited by my video card.

xboxrulz

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Can a 64 emulated OS access 3gb of ram and more than ~210mb of a graphics card?

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This is a very thorny question. Graphics cards are directly wired to the motherboard and are typically not properly accessed through emulation beyond software (non accelerated) mode.

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Do you mean that a 64-bit guest operating system access more than 3GB of RAM? Yes it can given that your host machine has at least 1GB more memory than what you specified.

Your graphics card will NOT affect the address space on a 64-bit address space because the address space is too big for us to worry about right now. Maybe in the future, but not right now. If you're talking about an integrated graphics processor, then just dock 210MB of memory off your host operating system. Since the guest operating system is virtualized (it's not emulated since there's nothing to emulate), it will NOT care about your physical computer's graphics chip, it'll care about how much video memory you assign it through the virtualization manager.

Also, in a virtualized environment, the guest operating system doesn't even know about your actual graphics chip. If I have VMWare, my guest operating system will think that I have a VMWare graphics chip, not my ATi/NVIDIA chip. This is because graphics chips are NOT virtualized at all. Only the CPU is, everything else is done by indirectly passing instructions from input devices.

xboxrulz

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Wouldn't the lightest possible be to compile your own? I am not certain that so doing would meet your needs but, it would be Light.

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try DSL (Damn small linux)
Damn Small Linux is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution.

Damn Small is small enough and smart enough to do the following things:

* Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD)
* Boot from a USB pen drive
* Boot from within a host operating system (that's right, it can run *inside* Windows)
* Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call "frugal install"
* Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install
* Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
* Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)
* Modularly grow -- DSL is highly extendable without the need to customize

http://damnsmalllinux.org/

it is te lightest linux i know,or you can use a live cd distro

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