Linux Mint Forums

TestDrive is a project that makes it very easy to download and run the latest daily Ubuntu development snapshot in a virtual machine.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/testdrive-tes ... chine.html

That looks pretty neat. Only two problems I can see.
1 It's Ubuntu
2 It's a virtual machine.

Virtual machines do not test how hardware works on a particular distro they test how hardware works on a particular virtual machine, and that is such a vast difference that for me it makes virtual machines pretty worthless. I know there will be many who disagree, but to me how a distro works with my hardware is about 90% of what I want to know about it.

viking777 wrote:Only two problems I can see.
1 It's Ubuntu
2 It's a virtual machine.

I believe it says on the link that it should work with any OS iso, but haven't tested it myself yet. Intend to have a play when time allows, if it makes setting up VM's easier then it could be useful for checking out new distros to see if it's worthwhile burning to disc?

I agree about the VM and hardware, but I guess it's intended for desktop developers, beta testers and the curious.

I believe it says on the link that it should work with any OS iso

I missed that bit, but can't you boot any iso in a virtual machine anyway? What is special about this one.

Don't bother answering I will read it in more detail tomorrow.

Ok I see from the video that it is running the iso in qemu, although it doesn't make clear how that came to be installed. Maybe it is part of the 'testdrive' package. I guess it also takes care of the qemu command line syntax automatically too which is perhaps daunting to some users.

Quite clever really.