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I've been long accustomed to running Windows on my Laptop while been logged in to a Fedora Server in our office via Putty / XWin / SAMBA to seamless run Linux commands on data.

For my next assignment I'm often out in the field with spotty internet connectivity / laggy high latency networks so doing work on the remote Linux server back in our office is proving difficult.

Is there a good way to have the Linux server also running locally on my laptop & thus do a ssh from Windows merely to a local machine instance?

Some ideas:

I know how to install multi-boot but that needs booting from one OS to another & that's not what suits my Workflow. I need to simultaneously work on both systems.

I had tried running Fedora on VirtualBox within Windows but that experience wasn't great. Though that was a WinXP era machine and 5+ years ago so maybe things have improved? Have they?

PS. My current laptop is a Dell Inspiron with 4 GB RAM with a 2127U processor. It would be ideal if the solution could run on this. The specs. seem to say it does have virtualization support.

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    Virtualization is obviously the way to go - as its different OS's you need full virtualization rather then paravirtualization. Hopefully others can comment on the most appropriate virtualization system to use, and whether to use Windows in Linux or Linux in Windows. Virtualization has certainly improved over the last 5+years. The RAM is on the light side for virtualization, but its quite (practically) doable.
    – davidgo
    Feb 25, 2016 at 10:31
  • @davidgo Thanks! Other than the Linux-on-Win or Win-on-Linux options is there a Win+Linux-on-top-of some sort of native, OS-agnostic virtualization option as well? Feb 25, 2016 at 11:36
  • @davidgo Since my existing Laptop already has Win installed on it & if I did buy a new laptop it would most likely come with Win pre-installed on it there's some slight preference for Linux-on-Win virtualization. OTOH, my experience with Win indicates it is a resource / power / stability hog so perhaps Win-on-Linux would work nicer in practice? Any empirical / anecdotal observations? Feb 25, 2016 at 11:39

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You can try to use a different linux distribution that use less memory on Virtualbox, something like slackware or devuan.

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  • Thanks. I don't to change Linux distros if at all possible due to all my familiarity / tooling / packages / scripting pre-existing on Fedora. I could port stuff but that would be a last resort. It might be easier for me to just buy a newer, more RAM Laptop if that's going to help. Feb 25, 2016 at 11:41
  • Whit a little more (min 4GB) ram you can increase the performance of your windows system. Feb 25, 2016 at 11:44
  • I could buy a new laptop with 8 GB RAM if that's going to help a lot. Feb 25, 2016 at 11:52
  • 8 gigs of memory is a good idea for a new vm server, as is ssd.
    – davidgo
    Feb 25, 2016 at 18:04

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