[Gambas-user] Gambas3 & andLinux on WinXP

[Bruce Bruen]

On Thu, 2012-04-12 at 12:58 +0200, Rolf-Werner Eilert wrote:
> Am 09.04.2012 12:09, schrieb Randall Morgan:
> > I've used virtualbox from Sun Micro for my Windows Vista and 7 laptops to
> > run Linux. Makes it simple and takes up only a little more space.
> >
> 
> Though it's slightly off-topic here :-) I don't hesitate to ask back 
> here. In our environment in the firm with Win7 only running on one 
> machine in the account office for the accounting programs and the rest 
> running on a Linux server with LTSP and thin clients, it would be quite 
> useful to have one of the Gambas programs for the Win7 machine. Now I 
> have to write programs for Win and Linux if I want access to data on the 
> server from both places.
> 
> So I tried to use Virtual Box as a thin client, and it runs quite nice, 
> but then it pauses (and seems to wait for something) every two minutes 
> or so. This pausing lasts for 15 - 50 seconds, so the solution proved 
> unusable.
> 
Rolf,
I know a fair bit about running it the other way around (hereafter OWA),
i.e. using VBox to host a windows OS on a Linux base, but not much about
hosting a Linux OS on a Windows base.  But here goes.
The first things I would look at are:
1) Is the VBox "Linux OS system drive (aka /)" local to the Windows
machine or is it on the LAN?  I have seen something similar when I was
running a set of alternate distros in VBox where their disk images were
on a NFS server.  I couldn't understand why, now and then, "disk
contention" seemed to occur.
2) Another OWA issue seems to be the virtlan0 network connection (or
whatever it's called).  This seems to be an ongoing issue with VBox.
It, in my opinion contends too much with the real network I/F's and low
level things like arp. Unfortunately, I have not found a really solid
solution and usually resort to killing the virtlan0 IF.  (Your mileage
may vary.)
3) Make sure that the virtual machine has absolutely no swap.  In other
words it should be able to run without any swap contention (otherwise
you have it swapping into/outof it's "pretend" memory, then into/outof
the hosting memory/swap and then, dog forbid, in and out of Microsoft's
memory mismanagement system.


...

In fact, this is where I would really be looking.  Make sure that the
VBox is grabbing the maximum possible (I'll rephrase that, the MAXIMUM
POSSIBLE) memory space on the host machine.  If the users complain that
they cant VOIP their being-friend or can't google/face-tube/ubook etc
while the accounting system batches are being posted then that is a
problem that only they can solve.

...

 
> In my case, a virtual machine as a thin client is not the only way. 
> There is a samba drive on the Linux server which serves the Windows, so 
> I could as well start a whole Linux in Virtual Box and access that drive 
> to fetch the data, but the terminal server is surely the more efficient way.
> 
> So, all I would like to know is if you have an idea what could cause 
> these pauses as I haven't found anything about it.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Rolf
> 

hth
Bruce