Great feedback everyone. I installed Mint yesterday, I like it but takes few minutes to start, although it is not an issue. Bill, you are correct 100%, ideally I need a browser that will allow me to browse without worry about viruses and if I get them, return the VM to the original state. I would like the distro to run relatively fast and not to take much of the host memory.
The issue with video is on my BackTrack, I can't get it to work on the right resolution, the only choice are 4:3 instead instead of 16:9, surprising because all monitors are 16:9 aspect ratios. It works well on Mint. Thanks, Aldo ________________________________ From: Bill Bogstad <[email protected]> To: Edward Ned Harvey <[email protected]> Cc: aldo albanese <[email protected]>; [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, March 6, 2012 11:58 AM Subject: Re: [Discuss] Light Linux Distro for VM usage On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Edward Ned Harvey <[email protected]> wrote: > > There is no such thing as a "light" distro, if you want a desktop and a web > browser with flash, etc. Your probable choices for a user-interface desktop > would be Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint. > > You're running the linux machine in the VM guest, right? Not the host? > Make sure you install VirtualBox Tools (or whatever they're calling it now) > into the guest OS. Then you shouldn't have any display sizing or > performance problems. It sounds to me like he wants a VM guest optimized as a web browsing kiosk. It's certainly the case that the default install of most Linux distributions targeted at desktop users is going to have lots of stuff not required by his use case. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any distribution optimized for that, but it sounds like an interesting niche. One thing to try might be to start with a minimal server install of a distribution that also does desktops well and attempt to install your browser of choice via package management. If dependencies are done right, you should end up with a fairly minimal footprint compared to a full desktop install. Unfortunately, that's not the hands off, single install that Aldo apparently wants. Nor do I know exactly what the "fill the entire screen" issue might be. If the issue is that he wants VB to start up in full screen mode, it seems hard to find that info. However, the command line: VirtualBox --startvm VMNAME --fullscreen works for me. "VirtualBox --help" describes several command line options which don't seem to be documented in any of the manuals or the on-line help that is part of the default install. As you suggested, installing the guest tools is always a good idea as well. Bill Bogstad _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
