I have started my Freshman year to work on a Computer Science degree focusing on Networking and Cyber Security. My problem is the University gave me a free copy of the new Microsoft Office suite because I will need Power Point, Access, Excel, ect... but I am running Ubuntu.
The work-around I cam up with was to install Virtual Box then install Windows 8.1 in VBox. I then installed Office into the Windows VM. Then I installed Guest Editions. When I fired up Excel for the first time (I have to build a budget for my first project due 1.27, it runs PAINFULLY SLOW.
I gave Windows 25 gigs of space I gave Windows 4 of 16 gigs of RAM I have an AMD 6300FX 6 core processor and gave Windows 2 cores
Dose anyone have any sugestions on configuration or upgrades to get the system to run faster?
Check if you have hardware virtualization enabled. I think it's called AMD-V. Check in the UEFI as well as in the VM config in VirtualBox. Windows is not really usable without hardware virtualization.
One or more disk image files are not currently accessible. As a result, you will not be able to operate virtual machines that use these files until they become accessible later.
Windows.vdi Virtual Size 25.00 GB Actual Size 14.78 GB
9.12. Configuring the BIOS DMI information The DMI data VirtualBox provides to guests can be changed for a specific VM. Use the following commands to configure the DMI BIOS information. In case your VM is configured to use EFI firmware you need to replace pcbios by efi in the keys.
I'd install 7 for simplicity, but ya make sure it's all enabled in your bios. Or you could buy a cheap secondary hard drive and just dual boot your machine.
I could not find Visualization in my BIOS. ASUS UEFI 2501 x64
I do have a second SSD but I would prefer not to use a duel boot system. That has caused me problems in the past and I would prefer to keep Windows in VBox for security reasons. I already use VBox to run Kali and Metasploitable.
It's pretty simple, anytime you boot your PC you just press a button and choose a boot device, or you set it to a certain boot order, with the GNU/Linux drive being first.
What motherboard is it? AMD generally seems to support virtualization better than intel anyways. It's like the one thing they're good for
Well this has some info I think, but that's nearly the best AM3+ board you could have, I can't imagine it's missing options to enable/disable the virtualization extensions
I would just install Wine 1.9.1 and run it all in there or use Libre Office. At college I never had problems running Libre for papers, excel, whatever, and everything still ran just fine.
If you want to go the wine route it is pretty simple to set up if you want to fiddle with it.
You can look up on wineHQ if you need any packages set up in winecfg (enter in the terminal after installing to see what I mean if you don't use wine) and you should be good to go.
I now thing I am dealing with a memory issue. I'll pull my box apart, check the RAM, add more cores and let you know tomorrow what happens. Thanks for the help! Might be making this thread a little longer in a day or too.
If the UEFI is only seeing 4080MB there is a problem! I'll take it apart, put it back together, see what is going on in the morning. Then I'll be back to let you know what's up. Thanks again for the help. XD
With some Google Services you can make Powerpoint presentations, Excel sheets and Word documents. You could also use LibreOffice for this stuff, it comes pre-installed with Ubuntu i believe.
For the Access DB i don´t have a really good answer. Maybe run a MySQL DB with XAMPP? But that seems a little far fetched. I found this topic on AskUbuntu about LibreOffice supporting Access files. Maybe that is a solution but i am not sure tho.
Assuming you sorted out your hardware problems (only 4GB out of 16GB installed recognized by the BIOS) ...
Installing VirtualBox and running Windows 7/8.1/10 inside a VM should be pretty "painless".
Download VirtualBox from their site, matching your distro, AND the VirtualBox extensions.
Once you downloaded the files install the Linux package.
Start VirtualBox and head into "File" -> "Preferences" -> Extensions ... and install the Extension Pack.
When you create a new VM make sure that under "General" -> "Advanced"... Enable ACPI, Enable IO APIC, Enable VT-x/AMD-V and Enable PAE/NX are checked. This will enable hardware assisted paravirtualization; meaning it will work a lot faster.
You may also want to look around and revamp some of the other settings. I usually set VBox VMs to emulate a "Intel HD Audio" controller as well as Intel PIIX9 chipset. Depending on your needs set the emulated graphics board to use 64 or 128MB - AND make sure you enable 3D acceleration (required for Aero/WDDM).
Start your VM and install Windows off of your ISO image.
When Windows has been installed install the VBox guest additions first thing - and reboot the VM when requested.
Hints and troubleshooting:
If it still "crawls" though you have setup your VMs correctly there are a few things you may want to check:
Apart from the aforementioned "SVM" feature also make sure you set "IOMMU" to "Enabled" in your BIOS (assuming such an option is available to you).
Check your /var/log/dmesg and /var/log/syslog for potential problems in the form of "AMD-Vi" error messages. In case your distro comes with systemd use "journald --system" to view the system log. If you have any errors in there that went unnoticed so far... chances are they originate from either ATI's or Nvidia's proprietary graphics driver or from some Realtek audio/network driver or from some USB 2.0/3.0 root hub driver. In this case you may want to reboot your system, trigger grub's menu, press "E" on the default boot entry to add "iommu=pt" or "iommu=soft" (without the quotes) after "quiet splash" and press F10 to boot the system... the errors should then be gone. Reason being... the AMD IOMMU support seems to be broken in a whole lot of kernels out there (the default "Lazy I/O TLB flush" behavior seems to be broken on Ubuntu's kernel 3.13+ as well as on the 4.2 "Wily" backport kernel, Fedora 23 et al ... the only distro (and derivates thereof) I could find which seem to work correctly with AMD's IOMMU is ArchLinux/Manjaro/Antergos/...). At any rate, if you had to manually add the "iommu=" kernel parameter: to make it permanent edit /etc/default/grub and add it to the GRUB_CMDLINE after the "quiet splash" and then run a update-grub (both as ROOT!).
You don't really need to cap the CPU cores the VM is allowed to utilize - especially not if you only run one VM in parallel to the host. Shouldn't impact the performance too badly if you drop out of the VM to do something on the native Linux host system. Assigning a limit on CPU cores is important if you run multiple VMs at once where each system (VMs and host) has to be responsive up to a certain point.
Note that putting the virtual hard drive image onto the same physical HDD/SSD as your Linux host system may cause performance problems in case the Linux host starts running some cron, or other, task that causes heavy disk I/O. You're better off putting the virtual drives on a second drive having enough space to hold them. In general Windows will be a bit slower because the emulated hard drive simply isn't as fast as a real spinning rust one.
Anyhow, Windows should run pretty well in VBox. Not quite as "snappy" as on the real metal but good enough (depending on the system specifics I'd say about 10-17% slower, but absolutely not "crawling along").