Ubuntu Netbook Remix and VirtualBox

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 6:26 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/9/16 Conrad Knauer <atheoi at gmail.com>:
>> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:47 PM, Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi, due to a lack of disk space on my laptop I can't run Ubuntu in a
>>> native partition on my laptop.  I run Xubuntu in VirtualBox, and it
>>> runs fairly well at times despite my laptop being a mediocre Acer
>>> Aspire.  I'm wondering, would Ubuntu Netbook Remix run well in
>>> VirtualBox.  I'm going to try it anyway but I'd like some 3rd party
>>> input if anyone has had experience do this.
>
>> VirtualBox doesn't (AFAIK) pass along the 3D hardware acceleration
>> that UNR needs for its graphical effects, so it's slow.

Well, technically recent versions of VirtualBox *do* support 3D
acceleration. Although acceleration is a bit of a misnomer since isn't
often isn't noticeably faster than unaccelerated. It certainly isn't
nearly as fast as native and tends to be buggy.

> In any case, UNR is basically a slightly different interface for
> GNOME. (In fact, "Switch Desktops" in Preferences can be used to
> switch between the UNR interface and stock GNOME.) So it'll be just as
> fat and slow, I mean, fully featured.

At least you won't be using the "netbook-launcher" which is dog slow,
even with 3D acceleration enabled in VirtualBox 3.06 on a dual core
with a chunky ATI Radeon and /apps/netbook-launcher/force_low_graphics
is set to TRUE in gconf *.

* See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/netbook-remix-launcher/+bug/320796.

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted