AQemu Virtual Machine Installatioin

[oldschool1]

Ralph and Garry,

I got the info regarding risk of installing on hard drive here: http://virt-tools.org/learning/install- ... mand-line/

"File, logical volume or SAN? Storing the disk as a plain host file is the easiest option. As long as you have enough free space, you can put the file anywhere, and move it around later. However file access isn't very fast, so for the best performance you should choose an LVM2 logical volume (LV) or (if you have it) a dedicated LUN on your SAN storage. Using a host partition or host disk directly is not recommended for security reasons."

I assumed because any malware could more easily gain access to your hard drive if the vm were stored there, perhaps wrongly. Since I don't have a SAN, USB stick seemed logical. I am perfectly happy to leave it on my hard drive though if there indeed isn't much risk, and to enable file sharing.

Ralph, I don't have time this second to try your instructions. I will get to it later and report.

Regarding gnome3, can't say I am a big fan, but I was using Ubuntu (was turned off when they started sharing private searches with Amazon without telling anyone) and then Linux Mint, only to discover that Mint embedded flash into the OS or so appeared to me, with a file called mintflash or something like that. I remove all flash off my hard drive as a matter of habit and then install it on a virtual machine for security and privacy reasons. When i removed mintflash, Mint broke... Debian now seems the most secure, private, and supportable Linux distribution to me, and gnome seems most respectful of individual privacy and greeny friendly (again to me), so I can put up with the gnomish behavior, but this might be an argument for another thread.

I very much appreciate your help.

[GarryRicketson]

Hmm, interesting, I looked at the link as well.
I suppose there is nothing wrong with being extra care full, they don't really go into details
as to why the "security reasons",...
I think that might depend somewhat on exactly what you are doing with the VM,
and especially if the host is a Windows, machine.
I suppose it might be a little bit safer, if one was booting with the USB stick, and running the VM from that. However, a lot of the windows "mal-ware" or "viruses"
still can migrate from a usb stick ,to the HD, But any way I suppose that also is another
topic.

[ralph.ronnquist]

Using a host partition or host disk directly is not recommended for security reasons.

That sentence refers to the idea of using a raw partition or whole disk rather than a file as virtual disk. And while I agree to the sentiment of avoiding it, "security" wouldn't be high on my list of reasons. Except that such a solution almost implies that the VM has to be run as root, which generically would be a security concern.

I would choose a virtual disk file for convenience, and that's fastest on the fastest file system of course. Maybe it'd be faster as an LVM partition (or maybe not), but certainly that'd be less convenient.