An Experiment with Windows 7 64 & Linux Mint 64.

As valued senior forum member whs pointed out Linux Mint Mate is pretty good and makes a really good desktop system. So I created a Linux Mint Virtual Machine and although my typing skills are not the best (sausage fingers) I got the Windows shares working and then a quick goggle found out how to install VMWare Player 5 in Linux Mint. From my Windows Share I then copied across Windows 7 32 bit. The virtual machine was running on an OS running on a virtual machine running on Windows 7 64 bit. The Linux Virtual machine would not run in 64 bit mode due to a bios issue of Virtual Machine Support not set to on. Now I am going to figure out where to stick a real installation of 64 bit Linux Mint Mate so I can run Windows in a virtual machine. Why? Because I can. The thing that has always put me off Linux was the hoops and secret handshakes you had to do to get it to see things like MP3 collections. This seems to have gone away. It just works. I won't be giving up on Windows just yet, but this is my Plan M (for Mint). If MS don't provide a real desktop this is where I'll be headed.

SIW2 said:

That's neat.

Mint looks like it might be great, too.

I have only had a brief look at it - and I know nothing about Linux ( yet )'

WHS is correct, you don't need to know squat. If something does not work you just search for it on the start menu and up comes the answer...install this package...type this command. Seriously if you are a keyboard ninja or can do Shell stuff you will have no problems.

I've been running it in VirtualBox for a few weeks now with no problems. It runs well Windowed, full screen or in seamless mode...

I'm running Linux Mint Mate and Mint cinnamon in VMware and they both run with no problems at all.

Yep. Jumped ship from Win7 Starter (total ***) to Mint Cinnamon a few months ago for my netbook, heck, it's even running the 64-bit version (the Atom n455 supports 64-bit even if it can only use at most 2 GB of ram... why?) and I have more than 400 mb free ram (out of 1 GB total).

And the fun part is that everything worked out of the box. Even the Fn keys.

I managed to sell some used company surplus PCs with Mint on them as well (instead of the ubiquitous XP), so far no complaints.

I replaced Ubuntu 10 LTS (64 bit) with Linux Mint MATE (64 bit) in January.
I could not make Ubuntu 10 run my ATI graphics card correctly (it had no problems with the previous NVidia card).

Linux Mint MATE (64 bit) detected all of my hardware and installed the appropriate drivers "out of the box".

Apart from a weird issue (a few weeks ago) with a couple of updates not downloading (which seems to have been resolved) it hasn't missed a beat.