Sorry, I can't think how to explain clearly in the title. I'm wanting to gradually transition from OSX (my current OS) to linux, probably lubuntu. What I would ideally like to do is to have the
same linux system set up so that I could either boot it from OSX under virtualbox, or boot it directly. But I'm not sure whether it's possible. If so, my thought is to initially use linux mainly in guest mode, but as I migrate my applications and files, to gradually switch to spending most of the time booted in linux.
As to whether it's possible, I can see two obvious gotchas:
- Ensuring that OSX can read/write the linux ext4 filesystems. My thought here was to use raw writethrough mode, with the partitions mounted using macports' e2fsprogs. Is this likely to work?
I would need virtualbox guest additions loaded in the guest, but not when the system was running directly. This requires some way for the operating system to detect (maybe from a different vmlinuz option) whether it's running as a guest, and to conditionally load GA. Any thoughts on the best way to do this?
Are there any other gotchas that I haven't thought of? Or can you see a better way to manage this transition?
Thanks and Best Wishes
Bob