virtualbox.org

I'm looking for the smallest free *host* OS that will support installing virtualbox 6 from pre-built binary. Here are the options:

1. Windows 7 64 bit (not free but I have a license)
2. Solaris
3. Ubuntu 18.04 / 18.10 / Debian 10
4. Ubuntu 16.04
5. Ubuntu 14.04 / 14.10 / 15.04
6. Debian 9
7. Debian 8
8. openSUSE 15.0
9. openSUSE 13.2 / Leap 42
10. Fedora 29
11. Fedora 26 / 27 / 28
12. Oracle Linux 7 / Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 / CentOS 7
13. Oracle Linux 6 / Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 / CentOS 6

Note that my VM *guest* is full ie *not* headless, so the VM host probably needs a DM but can be minimal (i'd be fine with starting virtual box VM GUI from a terminal if such a host setup exists). Just enough to host the VM guest window

Just look at the requirements of each host OS. Then look at what distributions are available for the Linux distributions. One thing to remember is that 32-bit host support has ended with 6.x, so the requirements in terms of RAM (at least) have increased.

Win7 is going to be EOL in a while (2020-01-14, not even a year from today). I would go with a recent Ubuntu LTS release, like 18.04, but after a point it's more of a question "What do you feel comfortable with?"...

I have no actual data to back this up but I think I would look at something like Devuan that doesn't use systemd as it's init system as it should be smaller and more configurable.

-Andy.