My computer is too powerful for Linux!

ViciousPenguin

ViciousPenguin

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I have the most wonderful problem. My stepson (bless him) give me an amazing PC as an early Christmas gift. It's got an 8-core CPU (liquid-cooled), 32GB of RAM, a monstrous graphics card (I forget the make and model) and a 1TB WD NVME drive that promises to boot anything I load on it in the blink of an eye. On top of this, I migrated over a couple TB worth of spitting drives, with plenty of open space. It's amazing!

The Big Question is - What am I going to do with all of that horsepower? My last machine served a simple web site, held my music and movies, and occasionally backed up my laptop. Linux breathed new life into its old, modest hardware, and I was happy with that. But this machine ... this one can do so much more. So with that in mind ...

Help me put this beast to work! I'm currently inclined to keep the existing setup (apache, media, backups) and throw a few virtual machines in it, but to what end? (Aside from the obvious distro taste-test.) I'm open to all ideas, so throw them at me. Let's see what sticks. : )
 


My computer is too powerful for Linux!
Click to expand...

I don't hear that too often :)

G'day @ViciousPenguin and welcome to linux.org

I run 60 Linux on this rig, so if you are interested in trying some multi-booting, I can put together some ideas for you.

Let me know

Cheers

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
 
wizardfromoz said:
I run 60 Linux on this rig
Click to expand...

Thanks @wizardfromoz. That's a lot of Linux. A lot more than I'm used to, anyway.

I don't think a multi-boot environment is what I'm looking for, although maybe I could be talked into it. Rather, I think I'd like a stable host system for basic web serving, remote access, etc., and a handful of VM's for play and projects. The question, then, is what projects?

Of course, I might be putting the cart before the horse, as there are a few projects that lend themselves to the project of setting up the projects...
  • Just setting up some VMs will be a task all by itself.
  • Then there is networking and setting up those VM's as subdomains.
  • And managing users across those systems will be a thing.
So, there's some fun right out of the gate. But once the VMS are running, I feel like they should have a purpose. One of them should be set up to do science, as a the good people above have suggested. And there will be the previously mentioned distro taste-test. And then...

Yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself. I've already got a lot to do.

If you have any preferred tools / resources for ⬆ list ⬆ I've already made myself, I'd be happy to hear your suggestions and follow your links.
  • What's your favorite way to host VMs? (VirtualBox? QEMU? VMWare?)
  • Is LDAP the way to manage users across machines?
  • Do I need to learn bind in order to make VMs available as subdomains, or is there an easier way to manage a small network?*
I'll check in from time to time, and maybe keep the thread alive by posting progress. Thanks for the offers and ideas so far, and for the ones yet to come. :)

* - Bind looks like a serious learning curve. If you tell me that I can do something as simple as type names and addresses into /etc/hosts, I may threaten to kiss you once COVID is over.
 
Thanks for the suggestions @stan and @f33dm3bits. Donating some of this power to GOOD sounds ... well ... good. :) I'll be referring to those links soon, I think.
 
I have a couple of monster PCs and my laptop is a 'workstation' with ungodly resources.

I use 'em to run virtual machines. I can boot a 'live' instance in fairly few seconds from an .iso file. It's pretty fun.

So, if you want to use some resources, play with virtual machines. Try out new and interesting OSes. Try out configuring them for different purposes. At any given time, I may have 4 to 6 VMs up and running, doing different tasks. I often don't even use those computers directly. I ssh into 'em with x forwarding or use VNC.
 
I have used VirtualBox a couple of times and found it OK. I believe @f33dm3bits is a QEMU user, and he could comment on that.

With VB, I found you can throw about 70% of your RAM into the Guest, before it starts to complain, so in your case, you could allocate 20 GB to the Guest and get a good idea on performance on something you might later choose to install.

ViciousPenguin said:
I may threaten to kiss you once COVID is over.
Click to expand...

Fortunately I know nothing about bind, and fortunate too for you as I have a bushy beard.

If you have time up your sleeve, consider swinging over to Member Introductions and telling us a little of the @ViciousPenguin story and meet some more of The Gang.

Cheers

Wizard
 
wizardfromoz said:
I have used VirtualBox a couple of times and found it OK. I believe @f33dm3bits is a QEMU user, and he could comment on that.
Click to expand...
QEMU/KVM has the kernel component in the kernel allowing you to get close to native performance with your virtual machines. I use it for my lab setup in combination with the graphical front-end, virt-manager.
 
The only reason (for me) to use VBox/VMware over QEMU is the lovely GUI management features. If you don't use those, use QEMU - though Gnome Boxes is a QEMU front-end but I never really spent any time playing with it.
 
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