Memory requirement in old versions

[12salida]

Hello,
I am looking for the minimum memory requirement for Vritual box old versions, but I cannot find it.
Are there any versions where we can run at 128, 256, 512MB?
Is it possible Version 2.x or Version 1.x?
Thanks in advance.

[loukingjr]

I would think if you are trying to run Virtual Machines on hardware with very little RAM available your problem would be what sort of guests you can run.

[loukingjr]

I just checked and VirtualBox 4.3.10 with no guest running only takes up about 20MB.

[12salida]

I am thinking of running lightweight Linux like DSL(DammSmallLinux) and Floppyfw (router soft)
on the limited resource PC.
Any thoughts?
Thanks.

[loukingjr]

I am thinking of running lightweight Linux like DSL(DammSmallLinux) and Floppyfw (router soft)
on the limited resource PC.
Any thoughts?
Thanks.

how limited? DSL only takes about 50MBs to run. Not sure about Floppyfw or if it even runs in VirtualBox.

[12salida]

OK.
My question is, "Can I install any of the versions of VirtualBox in the limited resource PC with 128, 256 or 512MG?"
I am in a country of North Africa. I am kind of a adviser for vocational training school.
The PCs are very old and the memory size is very small. I am thinking what we can do with VirtualBox.
Thanks in advance.

[loukingjr]

are these intel based PC's and what OS do they run?

[12salida]

Yes, they are Intel-based PCs.
WinXP runs, but, if necessary, we can change to other OSs (re-install).
Thanks again.

[loukingjr]

well, I would say that trying to run Windows XP on a computer with less than 512MB is hard enough. Running XP and a Virtual Guest I would think would be very slow. You don't want use much more than half your memory for a virtual guest but I would think you could run a DSL guest in VirtualBox on a PC with 512MBs of memory. Not to sure about 256MB. That's fairly small just to run XP by itself. even if you installed a light version of Linux to replace XP, A PC with 128MBs is tough to do very much on. Maybe someone ese might have more info and can add to this discussion.

[12salida]

Thank again.
Do you know what kind of version of VirtualBox can we use?

[loukingjr]

Thank again.
Do you know what kind of version of VirtualBox can we use?

welcome. I don't think the version of VirtualBox is going to be the issue but you should be able to run just about any version.

[12salida]

OK, thanks anyway. We try.

[loukingjr]

you're welcome. like I said. perhaps someone can add more info.

[mpack]

Not much to add. VirtualBox itself has a relatively small footprint. But, VMs can't use paged memory, so you must have actual RAM available to satisfy your VM recipe, leaving enough for the host to run. You can easily test it: trying running any VM and afterwards look at the log file created. Near the top it will list the amount of RAM available when the VM was launched. Ideally you don't want to be using more than about half free RAM: so if you have a 256MB host with 64MB free your VM should use no more than 32MB RAM, which obviously rather limits the potential.

Other resource constraints may apply too of course, in particular disk space and CPU cores.

[12salida]

mpack, OK, thanks for your advice.