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raymac46

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I got tired of Ubuntu MATE in my Windows VirtualBox so I'm auditioning a couple of new candidates:

  • MX Linux 18 - I run this on the rails in old equipment and Xfce is always a good choice in virtual machines. It installed easily and I had to run the Guest Additions CD to get the full screen and other goodies, but it looks great now.
  • Mageia 7 - It is my favorite RPM distro and again was easy to install. I'm using the lovely KDE Plasma here. I had to work harder to install the Guest Additions. Although it claimed to have a package installed it didn't work, so I had to install the kernel development package and then build the modules from the Guest Additions CD. It appears to have worked because I'm typing this from a nice full screen in Mageia running in VBox. I am not 100% confident though as Mageia has a habit of breaking in VBox after updates.

Edited by raymac46
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securitybreach

Well I have not played with either one of those but nowadays, most any distro will suffice. Besides the package manager, you can make any distro look and act like any other distro.

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I've noticed with Guest Additions when they are pre-installed in a distro, sometimes they don't work properly if they are not the same version as your VB install. Several times I have removed them from the distro and re-installed the version of Guest Additions that matches the Vbox and then it works.

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securitybreach

I've noticed with Guest Additions when they are pre-installed in a distro, sometimes they don't work properly if they are not the same version as your VB install. Several times I have removed them from the distro and re-installed the version of Guest Additions that matches the Vbox and then it works.

 

Is this even after you update the distro?

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I've found that in general Ubuntu gets it right with the Guest Additions out of the box. The package in Mageia claimed to be the same version as the VB I am using but just didn't work. However I am pretty experienced by now in building the modules.

Mageia has maintained many of the old Mandriva features like the Control Centre and they have done a particularly nice interpretation of Plasma 5. It would take a lot of tweaking for me to get a Plasma look and feel like that. Also I think that MX Linux has a fine Xfce look and feel.

When you are using a distro in VBox it never seems permanent enough to do a lot of customizing. I just like it to work. If I can't get the Guest Additions going I trash it and move on.

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securitybreach

Nice that Mageia is still doing well. I used that distro for a short time back when it was called Mandrake.

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Yes it was one of Bruno's go-to distros back in the day, along with Slackware. I initially tried it with GNOME but it was very buggy. KDE has always been the default and it always worked well.

I never have really mastered RPM package management but Mageia has always had a nice GUI to do it as part of the Control Center.

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securitybreach

Yeah, he was the one got me using Slackware which then in turn, brought me to Archlinux. At the time, Archlinux was like Slackware but with binary packages. At that time, anything that brought me out of Dependency H3ll was a good thing.

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I've noticed with Guest Additions when they are pre-installed in a distro, sometimes they don't work properly if they are not the same version as your VB install. Several times I have removed them from the distro and re-installed the version of Guest Additions that matches the Vbox and then it works.

 

Is this even after you update the distro?

 

I don't quite remember as it's been a long time since I used VBox. When using siduction as host and a guest based on Debian stable, it's never going to update to the same version anyway so a newer version would need to be installed on the guest manually..

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  • 3 weeks later...

Well much as I like Mageia I am just giving up on it as a VBox distro. Once again the latest updates borked my install and I ended up at the grub> prompt upon reboot. I think Mageia is just not updating GRUB properly after a new kernel.

Probably I could have rescued it had it been installed on the rails but as a VBox install...nah.

I'll just keep MX Linux going for now. I've updated it a couple of times without incident.

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