Best Virtualization Options For PureOS

[Emily]

I need to run inside VMs:

• Windows
• OSX
• dubian, fedora Linux distros

I need it to be fast and relatively bug-free:

PureOS VM users, what’s the best VM software I can use? (I’m happy to use more than one, if that is required to get best performance & stability).

Thanks

P.S. Qubes VMs would have been ideal, but I just could not solve the problems that develop from sharing USB & Ethernet controllers through the sys-net VM. I’ll have to revisit it when it gets more stable. For now, I need something that is stable.

[zenbum]

I’ve run Windows 10 and several Linux distros under Gnome Boxes, virt-manager, and VirtualBox, all with no significant problems under several host distros (including PureOS). My personal favorite is VirtualBox, but that’s mostly just a matter of taste. Gnome Boxes, for example, is more “just-click-and-run” than the other two, with fewer configuration controls; although I’ve heard the latest version of Boxes (3.36) has more configuration stuff. But, basically, they all seem to just work.

Note: I haven’t tried to do anything very “fancy” like PCI pass-through.

I haven’t tried running MacOS in a VM. That might be a can of worms.

Hope that helps a little.

[joao.azevedo]

Osx won’t work in GNOME Boxes because Boxes uses QEMU and virtualization tool, and QEMU uses Seabios (Legacy BIOS) for initialization, and I am not sure that will work with Osx, as it will likely not support BIOS, only EFI.

But I maybe wrong, haven’t touched in a mac in a long time.

[ajlok]

Right now trying to set up some VMs under my PureOS-Librem. Gnome Boxes dies everytime i want to create a new VM.

KVM/QEMU with Virtmanager regularly freezes the guest VM (in most cases within the first seconds/minute) while Virtmanager stays absolutely responsible. The latter with virtmanager would be my weapon of choice would it run stable. New set up VM from an ISO within a minute.

On researching for “KVM QEMU guest vm freezes” there seem to be several persons having such problems.

So i will have to give VirtualBox a try, too.

[taylor-williamc]

As far as straight simplicity goes, I think GNOME Boxes is pretty nice, but if you need to really configure stuff or do more than USB device passthrough, you’ll probably want to go through Virtmanager or something else. And I’ve never tried macOS on Boxes - just Windows and several Linux distros.

[Emily]

Use this script: https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM

I was able to get to the OSX install to load inside a QEMU VM:

But because of something wanky going on with the mouse I can’t select the continue button and finish the install.

The symptom: When clicking inside the VM, the mouse jumps around, not really tracking the movements, as well as disappears in some areas of the VM.

The end result is nothing can really be clicked or manipulated with the mouse.

Anyone know how to fix the mouse problem?

[Emily]

Okay, I solved the mouse issue with that script. If anyone else wants to use that script and get the mouse working. delete the highlighted text below in basic.sh:

Add: "-usb -usbdevice tablet "

Doing that made the mouse work correctly.

Ref script: https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM

[Emily]

Well, I was hopeful that script would work, but for some reason, the last step just hangs.
The install doesn’t complete:

[zenbum]

When you figure out how to run MacOS on a Linux host, please let us know the details. The one time I tried it I quickly got frustrated and gave up.

Then again, on some days I can barely run MacOS on my Mac.

Good luck.

[Emily]

Well, after a several attempts, I finally got it working. There seemed to be a connection issue that was causing the last step to lag.

Next hurdle: getting pass-thru to work.

[Oi3B]

Hi Emily,

Could you explain the steps it took for you to get this Os on the Librem. I have tried and only got the .vmdk files.