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> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? They aren't ideal. But they d

> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? They aren't ideal. But they do have a good alternative that is in its late beta stages. Typically you could run a Linux distro in a chroot on the chromebook, after putting it into developer mode. Unfortunately the chroot does have limits - fox example it doesn't get another IP address so you can't coexist much with ChromeOS - such as using avahi. The new approach (named Crostini) instead uses a lightweight kvm based virtual machine mechanism to run a Linux guest isolated from the host. They also (by default) use the hardened ChromeOS kernel inside the guest. Note that not all chromebooks are currently supported but a new x86 chromebook should be fine. https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/ https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/containers_and_vms.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...

samstave 8y ago
Maybe you know the answer to this question I have always wanted: I want to be able to run multiple OSs/Installations-of-the-same-OS on a single machine such that I can swap between "running" OSs - meaning, I want to have one OS sleep while I use the other. So, if I have windows and ubuntu on the same machine - I dont want to reboot, I want to just put one to sleep and wake the other one up... OR Ideally - I want to be able to run them side-by-side in some manner that is greater than a VM running on top of the other... My System76 laptop has dual SSD drives in it, I'd like to have both machines running, with half the resources dedicated to each, and have my KVM switch between them. Anything come clsoe to this?
- severine 8y ago
  I think you can do that with Proxmox.
- rogerbinns 8y ago
  The specific functionality you describe is available in mainframes, although they are designed to always run a hypervisor. You can't practically do it in the PC world because the operating systems either expect to use a virtualisation interface, or they expect direct control over the hardware. The latter will also give better performance. Some virtualisation environments do have hardware passthrough. A good example would be having a high performance PCIE video card which is passed through to to a guest for gaming. You can also use real storage instead of files pretending to be storage, although this is less flexible (eg no snapshots). My recommendation is to use Ubuntu as your host OS and run Windows as a VM guest.

samstave 8y ago

Maybe you know the answer to this question I have always wanted: I want to be able to run multiple OSs/Installations-of-the-same-OS on a single machine such that I can swap between "running" OSs - meaning, I want to have one OS sleep while I use the other. So, if I have windows and ubuntu on the same machine - I dont want to reboot, I want to just put one to sleep and wake the other one up... OR Ideally - I want to be able to run them side-by-side in some manner that is greater than a VM running on top of the other... My System76 laptop has dual SSD drives in it, I'd like to have both machines running, with half the resources dedicated to each, and have my KVM switch between them. Anything come clsoe to this?

severine 8y ago
I think you can do that with Proxmox.
rogerbinns 8y ago
The specific functionality you describe is available in mainframes, although they are designed to always run a hypervisor. You can't practically do it in the PC world because the operating systems either expect to use a virtualisation interface, or they expect direct control over the hardware. The latter will also give better performance. Some virtualisation environments do have hardware passthrough. A good example would be having a high performance PCIE video card which is passed through to to a guest for gaming. You can also use real storage instead of files pretending to be storage, although this is less flexible (eg no snapshots). My recommendation is to use Ubuntu as your host OS and run Windows as a VM guest.