Do I have high enough specs for virtualization?

Support & Help Requests
#1

I’m very happy using UM as my main OS, but I’d still like to try a few different OS’s. Virtualbox looks like a good option, but I’m unsure if my current laptop has enough power for it. My 11e has an Intel Celeron N2940 and 4 GB ram, is this enough? All relevant (and irrelevant) specs here.

I’m guessing that this partly depends on just how heavy is the OS I want to virtualize, and how fast I insist on it being. Mainly I’m interested in trying FreeBSD (and DragonflyBSD, and GhostBSD. . . ) in a virtual environment. I would like to trying installing X but it’s not entirely necessary (CLI probably can get by with less resources right?).

I know my laptop is not high powered at all, but it has surprised me with how capable it is for most of my everyday tasks. :smiley: Hoping I can try this as well!

#2

I first used Ubuntu MATE on Virtualbox on my MacBook, which is an old Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM. It definitely worked, but it was slow, but at the same time responsive enough that I found I liked Ubuntu MATE :wink: So I’d say give it a try. It will help if your guest OSes/desktops are not graphically very demanding, e.g. GNOME will be slow but Xfce will be fine. CLI should be no problem.

1 Like
#3

Thanks for the advice! Yeah, those specs are not to far off from mine. I’ll think of giving it a try sometime. XD [quote=“elcste, post:2, topic:13243”]
So I’d say give it a try. It will help if your guest OSes/desktops are not graphically very demanding, e.g. GNOME will be slow but Xfce will be fine. CLI should be no problem.
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The BSD distros I’d like to try give you a CLI. If you want a graphical environment, you have to install X and the DE of your choice yourself. So it should be no problem playing around with them in Virtualbox. I’d also like to try installing Arch, in case I want to try that on real hardware later—stuff like that. :smiley: Not really graphically demanding stuff.

#4

I’ve been running Lubuntu 17.04 on an Intel N3150 with 4Gigs of RAM.
N3150 has a lower base clock frequency than your processor.
It works fine with 1GB RAM allocated to the VM so yeah I don’t think *BSDs are gonna be a problem.