OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Virtualization

AToF - DoneDirtCheap (touchscreen ArcaOS)

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JTA:
At Warpstock 2023, the ArcaNoae folks pointed out to me that ArcaOS will run well in a VM configured with just 1GB of ram. That comment stuck with me, and sure enough, I had a Microsoft Surface tablet laying around (it's my Wife's) ... it's specs:

  - i3 cpu, w/ 4 cores
  - 4GB ram
  - 120gb ssd

Being a Surface tablet machine, it's a TouchScreen system, and has the detachable keyboard. Everything else is a reasonable "modern" system, just, in my opinion, crippled with 4GB of ram (soldered in, no less!) ... who would run Windows 10 or such on this kind of machine? Apparently, someone who just surfs the Internet, and doesn't do much else.

But, can we turn this almost 5 year old system into something useful? Take away the Microsoft garbage, and run ... ArcaOS? The answer is ... YES!

The surface tablet was running Windows 10 Pro ... the 1st order of business is to make that Lean and Mean, per the AToF thread of the same name. One amelioration process later, and the windows OS was stripped down, and showed that it was consuming 2GB ram. That's 2GB left over for ArcaOS!

ArcaOS 5.1.0 thrown into a VM, and loaded up under VirtualBox 7.0.12, configured the same as my other AToF laptop, only this time set to 1GB ram (and 2 vCPU's) ... it jumps up and runs! Sure enough, those ArcaNoae folks were right (uh ... I'm not saying that I doubted them)! Ran a bunch of apps, no problems ... no evidence of lots of swapping. Nice!

With Winflector running in the HostOS, at least a couple of x64 apps can be brought down to the ArcaOS desktop. Not many other VM's would be running on this machine.

As a bonus, as ArcaOS is in a VM, on the Surface ... *touchscreen* ... I'm driving everything from the surface touch screen. No device drivers needed in OS/2!

So there you have it ... an AToF in 4GB's of ram ... I wouldn't have recommended this, as I run gobs of VM's at any one time for testing, but perhaps this would be useful to someone out there.

My wife doesn't know it, but she's now running ArcaOS! Another convert for the team!

Dave Yeo:
Generally 1 GB is fine for OS/2, things like Firefox and OpenOffice and some Qt apps might not be happy and running them together will swap.
I started out with Warp V3 on a 4MB system, without the WPS loaded it was mostly fine and going to 16MB was wonderful

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