this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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I think you might like DIstroSea. If you'd like to persist your experiments, then likely learning how to emulate systems with QEMU or VirtualBox (the latter if you'd like a friendlier GUI-led experience, the former if you want to go full-CLI virtualization). QEMU is great in how lightweight and easy to create and discard self-contained VM disk images can be.
I will repeat it once again... Why would you use subpar Type 2 virtualization and DKMS with VirtualBox when there's a perfectly viable UI for the kernel's built-in Type 1 hypervisor (Qemu being the userland): https://virt-manager.org/
I'm not the biggest fan of VBox either, it's just very popular and full of sequential "wizards" to guide the user along the process of creating VMs, so it might be one way to get started. I'd much rather work with QEMU though.
Virt-manager is a complete full UI for Qemu (and lxc and Xen) which works essentially the same way. It's been around since 2009.
That looks interesting. I like the idea of trying to emulate a system only using the command line - I learn a lot from hands-on projects like this
That might be fun then.
QEMU can be as simple as this:
Here you are first creating a disk image with the format qcow2 and maximum 20G capacity. This is a QEMU disk image format that will take up very little space and grow as you use up the VM disk.
This will start a VM with 256MB of RAM, the alpine.iso image in its virtual CD/DVD slot, and the disk image you just created as a virtual drive. This will come with networking enabled by default, so you'll have internet access from within the VM.
It should now drop you into the Alpine installation. Alpine is very lightweight so it's great for experimenting, but you could do virtually the exact same for most other flavors of Linux and BSD images out there.
Once you are done installing, you can power off the VM and then start it with this:
That's basically the same without the
-cdromargument, this time with 2GB of RAM. I find QEMU a delight to play with because it has sane defaults like that. Hope you have fun too!Thank you for such a detailed breakdown! I'll give all of this a go over the weekend.