Porteus to HOST VM's(T2's)

[ispy]

Hi & Greetz to all

I am looking for a small fairly simple HOST-OS to load a type 2 Hypervisor, e.g Virtual-box Vmware player it could be Qemu but would prefer a Gui interface preferably. Why am I taking this route rather than a type1 hypervisor well have you seen the size of type1 hypervisors those suckers are huge and more often than not, have crippled features, which guess what, they are the main features that ur gonna need. Also or as far as I can tell these are basically a base OS Linux or Windows tweaked & merged with a virtual machine, so really calling them type1 is a bit of a con in my book, they are in reality type1.5's, so no thanks to using them, well at least not for me.

So I got to thinking maybe a small fast OS (Possibly running in ram) bundled with say, Virtual-Box would be a highly desirable item to have as you can then load all sorts of OS's to try before you use. If by chance you get any nasty bugs you can dump the image quickly and start from scratch, so it would benefit in terms of security, whats not too like apart from a small reduction in speed (Just add more ram)?

I suppose considerations like X86_X64, Pae, Uefi, NTFS3, booting to an external USB HDD will also need consideration and how much ram etc would need addressing.

So to my question, is there such an animal which is based on, or is Porteus that is just Porteus without all unecessary software that is capable of internet access with VirtualBox + extras, Vmware player or Qemu (withGui) (KVM) or do you have to build/remaster it & if so How do you go about it? I am kinda surprised that this scenario hasn't been adopted with other distro's but maybe there is a valid reason for not doing so, maybe I am missing something possibly? However in my defense I have come to the Noob forum to ask this question.

So in attempt to tick all the boxes (possibly unrealistically):

X86 or X64 > Variable bootloader to USB/HDD > loaded into ram HDD etc > Porteus only with internet access & bundled with Vbox, Vmware or QEMU(Gui) (KVM) + Supplemental VM extras.

Call it a VirtuMorteus (X86 X64) if you like, it would be small fast & efficient, any thoughts or desires to help with such a beast?

Best Wishes & Regards,

Ispy

[Ed_P]

Rather than a HOST-OS to run VMs I would recommend a Grub2 EFI/Bios system to run ISOs or installs directly with the default menu booting a 586 Porteus system. On systems that support user booting it should run anywhere.

A minor caveat, Windows 11 systems that have EFI Secure Booting enabled. For systems like that this approach works: [Solved] Security Boot Fail (Post by Ed_P #67428)

[ncmprhnsbl]

So to my question, is there such an animal which is based on, or is Porteus that is just Porteus without all unecessary software that is capable of internet access with VirtualBox + extras, Vmware player or Qemu (withGui) (KVM) or do you have to build/remaster it & if so How do you go about it? I am kinda surprised that this scenario hasn't been adopted with other distro's but maybe there is a valid reason for not doing so, maybe I am missing something possibly? However in my defense I have come to the Noob forum to ask this question.

depending on how thin you want the 'thin client' host.
porteus as is, or specifically, one of it's lighter DE spins (ie. openbox or lxde) for 'thiness', function quite well as a VM host.
we even have a script(accessed via the 'system' menu) to download and build the latest virtualbox in porteus module format.
qemu seems to be workable: Has anyone managed to make Qemu work with libvirt?
there are vmware slackbuilds on SlackBuilds.org, so i presume that's possible ..
while it may technically have more than needed, it'll still be tiny in comparison to the other setups you mentioned..
also due to the modular nature of porteus, it's quite easy to drop the 002-xtra.xzm (media codecs and player) and 003-<DE>.xzm and still have a GUI, (openbox wm(with rclick menu), uxterm, mc filemanager)