So, I had this lil 30+GB 2.5″ ATA hard drive laying around. Old tech. Thought to myself, “Self, what useful purpose can this lil thing serve?” Answered self, “Self, put it in an external case and install some VMs on it!” “Why, that’s a very good idea, Self. I think I’ll do just that!”
So, after a miniscule amount of time (about what it took recently for an “Anytime Upgrade” of Widows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate on lil toy compie), Ubuntu 10.10 was running from the lil external 2.5″ drive.
Can carry it with my anywhere, now. Next, Linux Mint and a couple more.
Later… I used Portable Virtualbox to run the VMs (yes, Linux Mint’s on board now), and the experience is little different to a regular Virtualbox installation. Maybe a tad quicker to install. As usual, installing the VB Guest Additions is a little less straightforward in Linux guests than in Windows guests. Not difficult by any means, just a bit more fiddling.
I think I’ll ditch the Ubuntu 10.10 VM and keep the Mint VM, as Mint uses 10.10 Ubuntu as its starting point but includes quite a few more media apps and codecs from the getgo, and the seamless integration of such things is kinda nice for a lazy semi-geek like me.
Oh, well. Worked for a while, but I began hearing the “click of death” from that lil old
SATAATA notebook drive, so I guess I’ll just have to use a different external device. Before the hardware issue arose, it did seem that having the VMs on a separate hard drive from my OS drives (plural cos I tried it out on two different computers) was a bit zippier, even with the old 5400rpm ATA on a USB 2.0 connection.