virtualbox.org

Hi there
Usually when one is about to buy new hardware on which one will run linux, a big question is what video card that hardware has and is it supported by linux.

I'm wondering if this is still an important question/issue when one is running linux inside a vbox?

I don't understand the internals of virtualbox that well, but I'm guessing the underlying video card and the host driver aren't exposed to the guest; and that the guest is interacting with a virtualized video driver and thus is not affected much by what particular video card is being used.

Is this a reasonable assumption...or do we still need to make sure that the real video card is well supported by the linux guest we are going to run?

Michael

Michael, your understanding is almost correct. The "guest" OS will not see your actual graphics card. But, VirtualBox will utilize and take advantage of the capabilities of your graphics card, especially its OpenGL capabilities. I would go with a powerful, yet proven (from a drivers point of view) graphics card from one of the major vendors.