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A Conservative Approach


raymac46

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I have decided to take a conservative approach with VirtualBox installs this year. I really need only one instance of it anyway - to have a Linux O/S available in Windows 10 on my main desktop.

I am running 4 different Linux distros - Mint, Arch, MX-17 and Debian Sid - on the rails on 4 different machines so I have plenty of variety. Stabillity too, as the rolling releases are excellent this way.

I have had trouble with them in VirtualBox - what with all the kernel updates and VBox updates something will break sooner or later (usually the Guest Additions.) Yesterday my Debian Testing VBox install lost its full screen capability and I didn't want to spend hours debugging it. Rebuilding the Guest Additions didn't work. I think there was something wrong with the virtualbox-guest-X11 package but not sure. In this case the usual VBox answer is big hammer - nuke and repave.

So in my lone remaining VBox setup I have gone back to good old Ubuntu 17.10 - Guest Additions work out of the box, there are updates but not too many to the kernel, and Ubuntu is now using GNOME 3 again (which suits me fine.) Its a copout I guess. But so far it works.

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A conservative approach with VB seems smart. And I like that your distro choices allow you to see for yourself how Mint compares to MX, and how Arch compares to Sid.

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Yes if left unchecked VBox installs can be as bad as chainloading 6-7 distros back in the day. I think my distro farming is behind me now as I am pretty well locked into the Debian and Arch ecosystems.

The only RPM based distro I really miss is Mageia. I have liked it ever since Bruno introduced me to its Mandriva parent way back in 2008. Mageia does a really nice implementation of KDE 5 Plasma as well. The Mageia Control Center is still top notch.

Sadly they don't seem to update Mageia all that often. Of course that might be a good thing if you are using it in VBox. Siduction I believe has a nice KDE desktop but it's probably a bit hinky to use as a Virtual Machine.

Edited by raymac46
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I decided to install Mageia 6 in VirtualBox and had my problems. Mageia has a small netinstall ISO so I gave that a spin. About halfway through the installer failed due to missing packages on the server. So I downloaded the large Classic DVDD that gives lots of choices about how to install. After the installation finished I could not get X to work. Some packages were corrupted apparently. Maybe my download was bad.

Finally I downloaded a Live DVD with the Plasma desktop. This worked fine as a live distro and I was able to get the installation and update from it. I'll see how stable this VBox install will be.

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