Installation, Home and Virtualbox

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Usually I do a seperate /common partition on my drive which houses all my music, pictures etc and never gets touched apart from that.

I have a 250gb hard drive, and my install usually looks like:

/boot 200mb
/root 20gb
/home 50gb
SWAP 3gb
/common - rest of space

My question is, I assum virtualbox hard drives when i use it are in /home, so presumably i could fill up the /home directory pretty quickly.

Should /home be bigger, or can you get VBOX to point to the /common directory and make /home smaller?

I use physical partitions rather than logical as logical always mess up on me.

What advice can you give me?

#2

You can point Virtual Box to a different location.

#3

Cool. So if /home becomes just a settings folder, as i would administer everything in /common, how big would /home really need to be?

#4

Well, to give you an idea, I have 5 VMs in VirtualBox right now. all of their drive images are hosted on a separate drive.

My ~/.VirtualBox folder is only 1.2MB in size.

#5

/home size is a personal thing in many respects, though if you make it too small it will become a Pain in the Butt keeping it tidy.

I wouldn’t want a /home smaller than 40GB, especially considering the space you have on hand.

#6

I have to agree with that. Personally I have a 60GB /home

#7

npinn001 wrote:

> Cool. So if /home becomes just a settings folder, as i would administer
> everything in /common, how big would /home really need to be?

You can put the virtual drive anywhere - your machine descriptions will
remain in you ~/.VirtualBox folder but the actual virtual disk can be
elsewhere. I use this arrangement for an office I maintain so that all
users work from a common Windows virtual disk. Couple of hitches will need
attention for such a case.

  1. You have to make sure all users have r/w access to the common virtual
    drive.

  2. You can only have a single user running that virtual machine at one
    time - I sometimes have to kill an open session some user goes home without
    closing.

Getting the permissions right can be a PITA so pay attention when you set
things up.

–
Will Honea