> Looking for an idiot proof way install Linux Mint on Windows > System attached below
Your options: 1* two separate computers Honestly - this is the most idiot proof. 2* set your computer to run some kind of VM environment 3* dedicate a server machine to running VMs 4* Amazon Option 1 - Two separate computers. Its pretty easy conceptually. You need two computers, good enough for what you want to do with them. You can reduce your monitor and keyboard clutter by buying a KVM switch, or just use all the monitors! I run a software tool called Synergy that works like an antiKVM, sharing my keyboard and mouse across three separate machines with five monitors total. Option 2 - VM environment In linux that'll be KVM probably, so you can use the Host OS as a regular linux box and have any number of other VMs running as clients/guest machines. If you do more work in windows, then hyper-v is included with 64 bit versions of windows 8 and windows 10 professional or ultimate. If you run a lower/lesser/home version then there's an upgrade cost. Probably other solutions exist as well. I've used both approaches successfully, with a linux host at home and a win10 host at work. Remember the guest OS has less access to the hardware, so if your purpose for windows is to run games, then make it the Host OS and run one or more linux machines as guests. Likewise, PCI or USB passthrough is a bit odd, so choose accordingly. Memory - you need enough real memory to allow all your VMs plus the Host OS to run with minimal swapping to disk - ideally none. Option 3 - Find a server-class box with plenty of memory and look at running one of the dedicated VM servers. The host OS is much reduced and probably has no more than ssh and some kind of control application. I've worked a heap with citrix xenserver, but there are others as well. Same comments about memory, and its even more of a "all your eggs in one basket" scenario. But build it with redundant drives at a minimum and you're on track. Xenserver also supports pools, so you can have multiple servers sharing the load, and VMs can move from one to another host with zero downtime. Option 4 - how deep are your pockets? Amazon will let you run an EC2 "instance" for a dollar figure per hour, with specs of your choosing. Read the full pricing at https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ but you can have this for free each month for a year: 750 hours of EC2 running Linux, RHEL, or SLES t2.micro instance usage 750 hours of EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server t2.micro instance usage 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing plus 15 GB data processing 30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage in any combination of General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic, plus 2 million I/Os (with Magnetic) and 1 GB of snapshot storage 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services 1 GB of Regional Data Transfer After that, t2.micro costs 2 US cents/hour for linux on demand or 2.2 US cents/hour for windows. A t2.micro has 1 GB of ram, and disk costs 12 USc/month for a GB of storage on "SSD". Downsides - its not in your vicinity, Prices above are based on Sydney which is closest to us. - a t2.micro costs $180 US per year, and 30 GB of disk costs another $44. So you're looking at $250 US/year minimum to run this tiny host. - the first hit is free.... the free tier is to get you on board. - If you want more resources, you pay for it. Costs grow linearly, so double the ram and double the CPU cores is roughly double the price. An x1.32xlarge has 128 CPU cores, 1.9 TB ram, 2x 1.9TB SSD, and costs $25.23/hour. Thats $18k per month or $225k per year. For that, you can buy a jolly nice server and pay for power, cooling, and fat internet at home, or host it in a physical DC. That's my list contribution for 2016! -- Criggie http://criggie.org.nz/ _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
