Hi.
I have a Acer M5 laptop with 64 bit Windows 8.1, and I will like to have openSUSE Leap 15.0 within my windows environment as a nested appliance. How can this be done? Please advise.
Lin Rongxiang from Singapore
I don’t use MS-Windows myself, but my understanding is the application Virtual Box will run on MS-Windows, and create a Virtual PC. In that Virtual session you can then install openSUSE LEAP 15.
Ensure you allocate a pretty large amount of hard drive storage to openSUSE (I recommend you assign such dynamically with a large upper limit) and also assign sufficient number of CPU cores to the openSUSE Virtual session.
Since I don’t use MS-Windows myself, nor do I run GNU/Linux in a virtual session (rather I run WinXP in Virtual Box under openSUSE … and I run GNU/Linux directly on the hardware ) I will let others chime in with more detail, or with different recommendations.
Maybe by installing a virtualization environment in Win 8.1 (e.g. VirtualBox) and then running Leap 15 in a virtual machine?
AFAICS, that laptop was first marketed around about 2012 and, it has a 500 GB HDD and a 20 GB SSD.
Please note that, the Virtual Machine will be running as a Windows application, albeit, in the case of Oracle’s VirtualBox, with the possibility to configure a shared directory between the MS Windows world and the openSUSE running within the Virtual Machine …
You will need to carefully consider where the Virtual Machine components should be installed:
- On this openSUSE Leap 15 machine, Oracle’s VirtualBox (64-bit Linux version) is taking about 14 MB of disk space.
- In addition, the Virtual Machine where I have Windows 10 running is currently using about 50 GB …
Assuming that, that on your Laptop the 20 GB SSD is your system disk and, it isn’t too full, Oracle’s VirtualBox should install without any issues but, if the system disk doesn’t have enough space free, you may have to consider installing the VirtualBox system files to a directory on the 500 GB HDD.
The Virtual Machine where openSUSE Leap 15.0 is to be installed will definitely have to be placed on the 500 GB HDD – I suggest that, the VM should be created with a size of about 120 GB – please note that, this is an initial maximum size – after openSUSE has been installed, the actual space taken on the HDD will be less and, space will be allocated up to the maximum size as user files are added. Please note that, the VirtualBox management tools are able to reconfigure the maximum amount of disk space which the VM uses.
If you have MSWindows Home, then you will want to install Virtualbox or VMware Player.
If you have MSWindows Professional (or Enterprise), then you can install in the Windows’ own virtualization environment called Hyper-V.
With both VMware and Virtualbox,
The application itself will install in your C: drive but after installed you can re-locate where your virtual machine files are stored (By default IIRC both are set to a sub-directory of the Documents folder for your User).
Although not advisable, you can even set the directory to be on a direct-attached external drive or other location.
TSU
Yes, I had a similar setup with VitualBox on SSD and the VM Images on HDD running without problems.
@linrx](https://forums.opensuse.org/member.php/103184-linrx): as SSD prices have dropped a lot, if you want to keep that setup, you might want to consider upgrading your SSD. 128GB are available below EUR 50,- and should leave enogh space for VirtualBox and the VM-Images.
Thanks for the responses, I have downloaded VirtualBox 5.2.22 and have began configuring an openSUSE virtual machine instance.