virtualbox.org

First of all, my greetings to you, friends and GURUS!



Now, What I do is graphic design, I constantly use photoshop, illustrator, coreldraw, vegas, and many other graphics design and video softwares. What I would like to do is ( or already partially done) to set up ubuntu host with xp guest that has performance of or close to native install of xp.

My Hardwares:

motherboard - Abit IP35 Pro
CPU - Q6600 GO stepping ( will overclock in future)
RAM - 2x 2GB A-data DDR2 800MHZ ( will upgrade to 8gb in week or 2)
Hard Disk - 1 IDE drive 200GB, 2x 150 GB samsung sata 8mb cache,
2x Western Digital 640GB 2 platter 16mb sata, acomdata external usb& fire 300gb HD for buckup purpose
MONITOR - Dual monitor setup
GRAPHICS CARD - 8600GT 512mb GDDR3

What I have done so far:

I have installed ubuntu host on IDE 200gb drive and installed xp guest on vbox with raw partition on WD640GB for the time being. I let the virtualbox manage the cpu use and not so sure about dedicated cores ( advise? ) and did not enable CPU's virtual machine assist.

What I think, I will do:

IDE 200GB: Dual boot with ubuntu host & XP for occasional gaming

150GB: 1. virtual machines raw partitions (for xp NTFS) 2. Decode to folder

150GB: 1. xp guest page file 2. PS scratch Disk 3. Dual Boot XP page file 4. Scartch file for Video editing 5. Download to folder & initial unprocessed files from various medias which is also Decode from folder as well

I realise this would be the first drive to fail due to extensive use, so nothing important is kept in there.

2xwd640GB: 2 raid0s 1. beginning of the both drives about 50GB from each which supposedly is faster and almost match Raptor performance.
2. Rest of the partition in Raid0 for storage & Mediatomb stream to my PS3

My Questions:

1. Does it make sense to have this kind of setup for optimal performance or It doesn't make noticeable difference as to cost/gains where GB in storage goes for cost and performance in gains?

2. What do you guys recommend for sharing files 2 2x640GB between Xp guest and
Ubuntu Host?

3. What do you guys recommend? I am relatively new to Virtualbox and Ubuntu ( Former Windozer, one down 2 billion to go )

Thank you all in advance for helping me out !

HELP?

Hi,

first of all: Welcome, and I wanna have this hardware too!!!
Seriously...

I guess you want to make graphics-work in a VBox-Windows guest? I'm not sure, if it's the best joice.

If you want to make a dual-boot with XP and Ubuntu (as you wrote), make sure, that you have a non-NTFS-formatted disc for changing data. Normally it's no problem. Ubuntu 8.04 has a great driver to speak with NTFS, but if you try to copy files with öäü or other unusual letters, you may get a problem... (take a look to "shared folders" with that it will work)

At least the performance of a virtual machine is never the same than a host... so if this setup makes sense... I agree with you, to "burn" up the 2nd disc. But otherwise your configuration is very individual. For that... well you'll have to try it

Sharing files is implemented very easy in VirtualBox. It's called "shared folders". A todo can be read in the Users Manual
What will be recommended? I think, you did a good choice
I'm not sure, if I answered all your questions... so please ask.

best regards
DaLaunge