Sorry, I thought you were all trying to use the same computer. I still recommend the micro desktops Dell markets for offices, the Optiplex family. The size of a cigar box but all the power of a big tower. They are easier to open and work on than laptops, too.
And, yes, Neville, they run VM programs just fine. I use Gnome Boxes because it’s much simpler than the other VMs.
I have an Optiplex 9020 … i5 with 8Gb ram. Same small form factor, but it is older and does not run a VM . It is a fine Linux desktop… my spare.
There’s a switch in the bios that allows virtualization. Have you selected ON?
Hello Bill
Sorry, I thought you were all trying to use the same computer.
It is correct but for the first scenario where is need it run multiple VM instances at the same time. It for Linux being “lightweight”. It for the current Dell mentioned
The other scenario is for old laptops in perfect state and with RAM upgraded.
I still recommend the micro desktops Dell markets for offices, the Optiplex family.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve never heard about the bold. Time to do a research.
To be honest for a third scenario as a “simple” server for production I thought to buy a MiniPC as Beelink. In a channel in YouTube was Orange PI mentioned too (it is on my todo list yet)
The size of a cigar box but all the power of a big tower. They are easier to open and work on than laptops, too.
In other words it is a Mini PC right?
Best to all!
What are the specifications on this spare laptop? Is this the PC you are trying to find a Linux Distro for?
Yes, Manuel, mini and micro pc’s are terrific Linux platforms. HP and Dell make thousands of them to sell to corporations and when they upgrade, the old ones are farmed out to refurbishers and clearing houses for a fraction of their original cost. Since most were originally built to run Windows, it’s easy to flush the old OS and install any Linux you like. Just make sure to check the bios for an entry labeled ‘virtualization’ and make sure it’s enabled.
Beelink, Geekom, and the rest are probably new and more costly.
I will check.
I thought it was a property of the CPU?
Neville, I asked Lumo, the Proton AI, to fetch me the bios section for my Dell that deals with virtualization–can’t copy from the bios easily–
Power on the system and press F2 during boot to enter BIOS Setup
Go to the Performance section
Look for Virtualization (this controls Intel VT-x) — set it to Enabled
While you’re there, also enable VT for Directed I/O (VT-d) if you want better VM device passthrough (useful for things like PCIe passthrough or improving performance in some hypervisors)
Then save and exit (usually F10), and your hypervisor of choice — VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Proxmox, etc. — should be able to run 64-bit guests.
Bios drives the motherboard, correct?
Correct. I will be checking. Thanks
Looked at the BIOS … Virtualisation is enabled and VT-d is too.
So I did a test
nevj@mary:~$ lscpu | grep Virtual
Virtualization: VT-x
So yes it IS supported.
It turns out that years ago I ran a utility called cpu-checker and it said negative. It was wrong. It has bugs.
Reinstalled it today and it will not run at all.
I will try a VM in Gentoo. It looks like I was totally misled.
Thanks Bill.
I have Dell mini in my attic, it was running well with Linux, until the latest kernel upgrade, the CPU is no longer supported!! Since CPU’s are soldered to the board, it has become a paper weight!!
Try NetBSD .
Have you encountered a recent Gentoo bug involving libxml2 and python3? It stops portage from working. There is a fix involving use flags.
When is some environmental organisation going to sue these tech companies into oblivion, for releasing hardware that cannot be upgraded?
Its not just the processor, but the one that winds me up is memory fixed to the mother board and cannot be upgraded or replaced
Yep memory was also soldered to the board!! I was able to salvage the DVD player!!
I can remember at work paying $9000 for 1Mb of ram. It was on a board about 15in x 15in and was 256K chips all soldered. It was for an image processing unit.
I wonder how the voyager probes do it? They’ve got some scientific instrumentation, including taking pictures! How did they manage to make it able to send back pictures with only a few kilobytes of RAM?
DuckAI explains it this way:
While the onboard RAM is tiny, the probes utilize a digital 8-track tape recorder for secondary data storage, allowing them to record high-volume scientific data during planetary flybys and transmit it back to Earth at a slower rate when in range.
That’s a surprise would have thought tape was so old technology and digital had replaced in almost all forms
The construction of the probes started in 1972 and they were launch in 1977. Punched cards were still around in 1972.
So old technology keeps going 50 plus years later impressive