I really love Fedora, and I like Gnome 3 quite a bit. I recently had a bad experience with Virtualbox and VMWare Player (both free for personal use): Fedora 18 was unusably slow on both of them. TL;DR you need to bump up the graphics memory and enable 3D acceleration:
- Create your Fedora VM with whatever settings you like. I have mine using 3 CPUs, 4096mb of RAM, and 12GB of dynamically-allocated disk space (with a single EXT4 partition on the Fedora side mounted to /).
- Don’t start it yet or the performance will be awful and the installer will take forever. If you’ve reached this guide, you probably already know this.
- Right-click on your VM in the list on the left-hand side of the VirtualBox window and go to ‘Settings‘:
- Go to the ‘Display‘ tab, max out the video RAM, and enable 3D acceleration
- Enjoy your now-fast VM!
