First Qemu:
It’s a little old but the unixmen have good quick start.
As usual, start off great, apt-get all worked. Created a disk image attempted to start a new iso of linuxmint-19.3 with minimal success. It appeared to lock up during boot after I selected what to run. For now I’m going to move on, looks like there is a management gui.
Initial start of the gui tool, looked really promising. But I ran into a similar issue, the VM would begin boot but not succeed in any install. At least it’s consistent.
VirtualBox:
Let’s try a more “mature” vm. I started with this page for installation, as straight forward as apt-get can be! The article did mention Guest Additions to improve the experience, opted out for now.
Performance Digression:
I’ve been noting a slogish response via the NoMachine solution I’m using. It would appear there is a notable CPU load of 40% on the system, and this is after a clean reboot.
And the usage is correlated to me viewing the graphs. Now that I think of it, the graphs are extremely exacerbated by the NoMachine solution I’m using to run system. Since I still have local access it will be easy enough to test.
As expected, exiting NoMachine brought the load down to ~10%, then not watching the performance graph brought it down to <1%. I suppose I should migrate to ssh access to the linuxmint box to monitor and manage. Quickly going back to old school! Now that I have htop running through ssh I can see that the system is staying idle before boot. I can now have better visibility as I start the Qemu instances. However starting it responds with:
Looks like using a VM solution is a can of worms. The minimal hardware platform I am using make this un-realistic. Since my new drives are in soon I will probably skip the VM solution.