New intallation: help me decide...

[VJ]

Hello,

I'm about to install a new linux system. The hardware is quite old, but still good (dual Xeon 2.4, i7505 chipset, 3 GB ram, matrox parhelia, adaptec 7902 U320 controller, promise sx4300 raid, ...).
Main use of the machine will be hosting virtual machines, but as I like to be able to work on this physical computer, VMWare ESXi is not an option.

I was going to choose between FreeBSD, OpenSuse, Fedora and Ubuntu (with my preference for some reason in this order). While the control software for my raid controller is available for windows, bsd and linux; only the windows and bsd versions are updated. This lead me to prefer BSD, however, I found out that running VMWare Server on FreeBSD takes some fiddling (not supported out of the box)... Any experience with this?
Or is it better to avoid problems, and move on to the next on my list: OpenSuse. Any comments, things to look out for, hardware pitfalls, software pitfalls, ...?

Second choice I need to make: KDE or Gnome. I've worked with both (a bit more with KDE). Will there be any problems with either running on the Parhelia 128 MB? Any other particular reason (besides taste) to choose one over the other?

Thanks!

Jörg

[Haig]

VMWare Server on FreeBSD takes some fiddling (not supported out of the box)... Any experience with this?

None but I've used Virtual Box in headless mode without problems.

[VJ]

Interesting... I was thinking the vmware route, as I have more experience with it (and one machine I could reuse). Cross platform use is important, are the virtual box machines binary compatible (ie can you just move the files from a linux to a windows machine and boot it)?

So far, I think all my hardware should work on either linux or bsd. The promise raid configuration software may be the only exception (but it has older versions that run on linux). I do know that my mainboard dares to act up if it runs an OS that isn't fully supported, yielding a very strange behaviour: warm reboot usually fails. I experienced this with Vista (prior to some updates) and with an older Knoppix distribution... The mainboard website mentioned this problem with a Parhelia, but didn't really pinpoint the cause nor provide a solution (apart from the traditional "update your videocard bios"). I had the impression it was related to the OS, but don't ask my how/why.

[Haig]

ie can you just move the files from a linux to a windows machine and boot it

I never tried it but I believe you can just move the "host OS" files into the proper windows directory and vbox should see it.

When you install an OS, it saves it as .vdi. As long as you put that .vdi in the proper directory, it should be fine.

I think this is all you need since vbox also offers pre-made VDI packages where the same package is for windows & linux. You can get some from here:

http://virtualboximages.com/veedeeeyes/

[VJ]

Ok, so it is similar to vmware in that aspect...
Makes the choice slightly harder... but currently leaning towards Suse...