Alpha 1 desktop installation

[J]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 19:42, E.B. A. <usul80 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi - I am trying to install 10.10 Alpha 1 on Virtualbox. Somehow it's
> incredibly slow. Never had such a problem with previous version. I mean,
> after 15 minutes I wasn't given the option to install, run live etc.
> After 15 minutes the regular ubuntu tune played.
> During the first seconds I had two error messages (one with two colors). The
> links for the screenshots are :

I did NOT have issues like this... however, my setup is most likely
different than yours, so what you are seeing could be simply a
resource problem??

For example, I'm running the latest direct from Sun version of
VirtualBox, not the Oracle one, and not the OSE one that's in the
Ubuntu repos.  I don't know if there's a difference between the Oracle
and Sun branded versions, but there IS, I believe, a difference
between Sun and OSE.

Also my system is a quad-core i7 w/ HT and VMX enabled, with 4GB of 1333MHz RAM.

My VMs have 20GB full size files (I don't use sparse file images that
grow as they fill up, I allocate the full 20GB on VM creation) and are
allocated with 2 Intel network devices, 1024MB RAM, and 128MB Video
RAM (with 2D and 3D acceleration enabled).  My VMs disks are all SATA,
not IDE.

The only reason I mention all that is that the configuration of the VM
and the host system goes a long way toward just how fast a VM will run
on a given host with a given Virtualization system and a given OS. It
also makes a difference how many applications you run while running
the virtualization software.

Your screen shots seem to indicate you have TWO Firefox browsers open,
both with YouTube either streaming or at least with their video
players loaded, and who knows how many other tabs open each, as well
as a file download going, a terminal open, Virtual Box, and something
labeled file.c (I'm guessing that's either a text editor or an IDE).

In any case, the first thing to do when figuring out performance
issues is to remove all the crap that is eating up your resources.  No
firefox, no anything.  Fresh boot, run VBox, and then start your VM
and do the install.  See if that makes a difference in how well that
VM is performing.  Then, if not, start looking at how much is being
allocated to the VM and tweaking that.

In any case, at this point, I've done about 30 different Maverick
installs in VBox VMs on my system here, using both 32 and 64bit and
the ONLY time I've had issues with performance was when I had both the
32bit and the 64bit VM running, while reading mail with Evolution, and
web surfing with a Firefox session that had 20 open tabs, and 6
different xterms open while I was working on some python code during
the VM installs...

Turns out that starting up that second VM was just causing way too
much disk I/O when trying to install from two different ISO images to
two different disk files... so I killed one off, and everything was
back to normal.

Cheers,

Jeff