Thursday, January 8, 2015

Any Linux Preferences?

I just installed Mint Linux under VMPlayer.  It seems to boot, but that's as far as it goes: no UI.

I went Ubuntu 14.04 because I have experience using it.

22 comments:

  1. I use Ubuntu. It is relatively straight forward as installed from the net. It is, however, Linux, meaning that lots of things are not supported or you have to do your own sys admin to get stuff to work on it.

    I use OS X as my primary OS.

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  2. What are you trying to accomplish with Linux? Answer that and the flavour suggestion may be obtained.

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  3. Not sure why you didn't get a UI. I like Mint myself. It and Lubuntu do well on older hardware in my opinion.

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  4. Ubuntu. I have it running on two desktops and four laptops. Flawless install each time.

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  5. Try entering the command startx. That should start the GUI.

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  6. At the moment, straight Debian (this will likely change in the future due to systemd).

    Mint is based on Ubuntu (who's development practices are disastrous), which is based on Debian. Since you're running it in a VM, you shouldn't have any problems with device support which can be a problem with Debian, so if you go to the source you might get a clue as to where it got broken.

    What do you want to use Linux for?

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  7. I use Ubuntu on my laptop. Make sure you install the Gnome Classic Desktop - resulting ui is very similar to XP. Differences to be sure, but better than the Unity ui in my opinion.

    User base larger than other linux variants so often has better support for some packages.

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  8. There are two different flavors of Mint: Cinnamon and MATE

    The differences are in the GUI so one may run under VMWare Player better than the other.

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  9. I like puppy linux (run on live usb) and linux lite. Makes old stuff run great.

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  10. Does "startx" start the X GUI?

    If not, I suppose it's possible that either there's some weird manual config needed or you managed to get a Mint install without X installed.

    If so, it should be relatively simple to tell it to start X rather than going to tty login.

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  11. I prefer to use Fedora, but that is all it is, a preference. When I was moving away from Slackware, I did try a few Debian based distributions. I never did "grok" any of them, so I landed on what eventually became Fedora. (Redhat 6-8, Fedora 1-20)

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  12. Unfortunately, once I login to Ubuntu Linux, there is no obvious way to start a shell.

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  13. Yeah, they really dumbed it down. This sort of thing is one of the reasons I hate Linux when I go to use it, even though I love it in spirit.

    See http://complete-concrete-concise.com/ubuntu-2/ubuntu-12-04/ubuntu-12-04-how-to-get-a-command-line-shell-or-terminal

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  14. I use Debian on my ThinkPads.

    I prefer the KDE environment to GNOME, and I abhor Unity (the Ubuntu 14.04 default desktop environment).

    Right now NVIDIA is giving me fits though.

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  15. I use Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with the KDE desktop instead of Gnome. KDE is more like classic Windows.

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  16. Hit the "Windows" key on your keyboard or move the cursor into the hot corner (upper left). That should bring out the menus in Ubuntu -- assuming you're in GNOME or Unity desktop.

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  17. Ctrl-Alt-T does nothing. Ditto for Windows key, and moving cursor to top left. Kubuntu ISO produces same no UI result, as other Linux variants.

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  18. I had more problems with Mint and VMPlayer than I'd like to admit. On my old, slow AMD system VMPlayer worked like a charm, but on my i7 modern beast with all the bells and whistles I have more trouble with it than I like. Going to the 32-bit version of Mint and VirtualBox was trivial and worked the first time, so you might want to try that combo.

    Any particular reason you're putting Linux in a VM rather than doing a dual boot?

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  19. Linux in a VM because I will almost always being using Windows, and rebooting if I want Linux seems slow and clumsy.

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  20. Depending on what you're using Linux for, it may be that Cygwin can do what you want. I use VNC to get into our compute farm where we run KDE RHEL, but the machines we use to connect are Windows laptops. The office tools we use are MS, but I like the *nix tools for manipulating data. Cygwin lets me use keep a mostly *nix shell window and tools on the laptop so I don't have to keep switching platforms.

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  21. I missed that you were doing it in a VM. Don't use Microsoft's crappy VM stuff. Use VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/). It's much better, much more versatile, and you can get a bunch of pre-made machine images from here: http://virtualboxes.org/images/ You just download them, import them, and they're mostly ready to go. It's a good way to audition different distros.

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  22. I'll second the comment about Cygwin. For the many years that I had to use Windows as my desktop, I always had Cygwin installed and I used it a lot.

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