It has been a very long while since I played with linux. I mean, ‘play’ as in, code, install and also ‘play’ ofcourse. Since its been a while, I wanted to know the best distro( linux distribution ) with the least amount of fuss that could get me back into the linux world.
I wasted no time and headed on to distrowatch. After going through reviews and viewing the ‘Page hit ranking’, I narrowed down to OpenSuse and Linux Mint. Downloaded both of them and tried in VMWare. Found some errors with Suse hence I decided to pick Linux Mint for hard drive installation.
I burned the Mint ISO onto a DVD and booted up. Once I logged into the beautiful cinnamon desktop, I started the installation, which was pretty smooth. I chose one of the free logical drives, which had a capacity of 20 GB and proceeded to install it there. Note, earlier it was mandatory to install on a primary partition, but fortunately now its not.
Quickly configured the desktop, which was pretty easy, including configuring multiple monitors. I was able to easily access all Windows partitions without any issues. Facebook, youtube and gmail browsing through Firefox was all pretty smooth.
Next was Oracle Virtual box installation. Found that the download server from where we get the installation packages were pretty slow. Tried changing the servers, but not much use. But I had the patience to wait 🙂 After successful installation of virtual box, I wasted no time in installing XP. Screenshot is below
Windows XP running on Linux Mint 16 using Virtual Box
Next was to get the productivity apps. I installed Keepass ( keepass2) as well as some cool games like : Open Arena and Nexuiz. Screenshot from Open Arena is below.
Open arena gaming on Linux Mint
All in all, I loved the ‘Linux experience’
All of this sets stage for the grand plan that I have,
1. Linux firewall and honeypot
2. NAS server and backup for my videos, ebooks and song collection ☺