Technical Reviews and Geek Toys

I seem to be on a roll here so this article will cover the installation of Linux Mint XFCE on a virtual machine.  I am using Sun's VirtualBox to create the virtual machine. VirtualBox just works great and continues to improve with every update.

Linux Mint XFCE RC1 was announced on 3/7/2010.  Based on Xubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, Linux 2.6.31, Xfce 4.6.1 and Xorg 7.4, Linux Mint 8 “Helena” Xfce CE features a lot of improvements and the latest software from the Open Source World. For a detailed overview of the new features and improvements included in Linux Mint 8 Xfce, please read “What’s new in Helena Xfce?“.  It should be noted that this version is not advertised as a lightweight version.

I'll go ahead and walk through the steps of creating a virtual machine and boot up on the ISO image that I downloaded from the XFCE page.

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1.  The first step in creating a new virtual machine using VirtualBox is to press the New button.

2.  The Create New Virtual Machine Wizzard will open.  Press Next...

3.  It will then ask you to name the Virtual Machine and select what type of operating system will be running on the machine.  OK, yes there is a typo... it should be XFCE.

4.  Next select how much memory will be allocated to the machine.

5.  Next the hard drive image to be used as the boot drive is selected.  You have the option of using an existing hard drive or creating a new one.

6.  I have selected to create a new hard drive.

7.  I have found Dynamically expanding storage works well.  An advantage is it takes up less drive space on the host machine.

8.  The name of the hard drive is entered next along with the size of the drive.

9.  Click Finish to create the hard drive and proceed with creating a new Virtual Machine.

10.  Almost done.  The Summary page gives an overview of what you are about to do.  Click Finish to create the VM.

 

11.  Now we need to mount the ISO image in the CD drive.  Select the VM you just created and press Settings.

12.  Now click on Storage and under the Storage Tree, select the CD drive.  To the right click on the folder icon to the right of the CD/DVD device.

13.  Click on the Add icon at the top an navigate to where the ISO image resides.  Select it and select open.  The image will then appear as one of the ISO images.  Select it and press the Select button.

14.  Select System to verify the CD/DVD-ROM is selected as a boot device. and press OK.

15.  Back at the VirtualBox manager.  Select the newly created VM and press Start to start up the machine.  The screen shot above shows the XFCE Live CD up and running.  I could have left it here but it is so much nicer to install and do the updates.  So I ran the install and then ran the Update Manager and installed the 127 updates.

This is just a nice touch, especially being able to download a Users Guide.

The application menu is nice and clean.

If you right click on the desktop, the Application menu can be accessed as well.

The Linux Mint Control Center allows easy access to all of the controls (which are also found under the System Menu).

As an RC (Release Candidate) this release is targeted at developers and beta-testers who want to help Linux Mint find and correct bugs before the stable release. Please do not use this release as your main desktop.