Hello everybody!


this is about a small hobby project. For fun I have made a sort of quiz, searchpuzzle in tinkerOS. I just love the throwback to 16 color and the beep sounds. The intention is friends get a laptop with the puzzle on, need to solve the puzzle whilst being annoyed the heck with the sounds.

The whole tinkerOS thing is already made. At first I wanted to put tinkerOS on bare metal, but after reading how nothing is supported from keeping the laptop from overheating, I deemed it wise to put it in a VM.
Originally I made the whole thing in virtualbox, being familiar with it. I have a laptop to `tinker` with.

Where it is at now:
So now I am busy trying to get a VM running on boot. And are drowning in a sea of options. Just for learning, I decided to go for Arch, no GUI, no DE, then put QEMU headless on it (because you know, learning new stuff). After realizing QEMU uses GTK, went for the standard QEMU. I thought I got all the dependencies, but on trying to start QEMU I still get "GTK initialisation failed".

Now this thing is getting at a point where it is getting waaay too time consuming, for something I originally thought was gonna be pretty straightforward... (in my head). I`m pretty sure that if I would use a standard ubuntu, with DE, I could configure virtualbox pretty easy to start on boot and have the whole thing up and running in an hour or so.

But... that would be the easy way out. And bloat ( I know, you linux guys screwed me up good ever since I got my bootup time reduced to 10s with Arch), bloat would also give away the fact that tinkerOS is running on a VM, because of the long boot time...

Considerations:
- tinkerOS uses the 'beep' or built-in pcspkr on the motherboard, hassle to configure in virtualbox and qemu (but not impossible)
- trying to keep boot time as low as possible
- tried using qemu, because of better integration with linux and hardware support? (so it was said online... )

What the hell is your question?
In what way would you think it is best to setup this whole thing without losing days configuring stuff? QEMU of virtualbox? DE or not?
Am asking because I think I`m also overlooking certain stuff.. and there are so many options out there...


Things that will be done after VM setup:
- suppress boot options in GRUB
- suppress visual boot sequence in plymouth on startup

Edit:
I am only now seeing the virtualisation forum and immediately are learning about type 1 and type 2 hypervisors... of which existence I was unaware.. Hence my question. It seems I need to run a type 1 hypervisor? Which would be most suitable for an old laptop? Xen? Proxmox? Or do these things take a long time to setup?

I don't think you can do this without a graphical interface and/or peripherals.
Doesn't need to be a full-blown DE though.
Just autostart Xorg, starting virtualbox or QEMU or whatever in full screen. Look at kiosk setups for inspiration.

1 members found this post helpful.

You are most likely to need a Type-2 hypervisor, which runs on a Linux host OS. If you already had it running on VirtualBox, what prompted you to look for other alternatives?

As for the question in the title of your thread ... a guest can always determine (in various ways ...) that it is running in a VM. Many guests use this awareness to customize their behavior to work cooperatively with the VM monitor that they know is under there.