I'm a little worried about performance with VirtualBox and a machine with 2gb of RAM and a little over a Ghz of processing power - just judging by what I've seen trying to use VirtualBox over the years on more powerful systems. But it has made some great strides in performance so maybe it's time to look into it again! I do agree with some of the other commenters also who are worried about ease of use for the students.
I've managed to run Win XP guest in virtualbox years back on Eee PC Atom with 1GB ram, ran good enough for me to install drivers and configure it.
I don't think it should be a problem for students, all they need to do is install virtualbox (double-click installer on windows) and import the VM image (running a GUI wizard). I've done this before at a company I worked, new office building had Macs and OSX but needed to use some proprietary Windows app for parts of work so I deployed VBox and along with a preconfigured WinXP image to every machine. Nice part of virtualization is the hardware is virtualized so the image should work exactly the same across all computers, no hassle with hardware support unlike using bootable images.
Just find some lightweight distro that's easy to configure and is supported by virtualbox guest drivers.
Sounds pretty decent - I remember playing around with the EeePC years ago! I unfortunately crushed mine with a school book...sad story. I do remember it not being very powerful at all but if you think you could get WinXP guest running on it, I'm sure I could get a lightweight Linux distro running quite easily. I'll have to take a look.
There is no way you could run, in a VM, the latest Ubuntu smoothly on a low spec Windows host. You could use a less demanding Ubuntu derivative Linux that doesn't need a 3D accelerated graphical card.
Yes you can. As others have pointed out, it the DE that uses most system resources. For common development task you don't need 3D gimmick. You can install lightweight DE like LXDE or XFCE. I use Xubuntu in my home pc and installed it as a Virtualbox guest in my office pc allocating 1.5GB of RAM. Things have been buttery smooth. For a comparison of system resources used by different DEs see the article http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201109/page08.html. The article is a bit old but still relevant.
I haven't done it in a while but I did run virtualBox on a linux host and WinXP guest back on my old EEE PC 1000 - 1GB netbook with 1GB ram and Atom CPU.
I mean we aren't talking about creating a functional desktop here, all they need is a image that boots runs a text editor and has all the ruby packages pre installed - you don't even run heavy weight IDE like eclipse - this should easily be doable with ~512MB ram image.
But I agree and Ubuntu might not be the best choice of distro for this, especially with that unity monster.
