Light Weight LinuxMint for virtual machine

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perduta

Light Weight LinuxMint for virtual machine

Post by perduta »

I need a Linux that will be stable and support a range of packages and developer tools for a number of years and after researching a bit I think Mint 13 xfce would probably be the most appropriate.
Opinions and advice on this would be appreciated and also suggestions of what packages I could safely remove as a lot of stuff like multiple users and screen savers will all be done by the host system.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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jjaythomas

Re: Light Weight LinuxMint for virtual machine

Post by jjaythomas »

May want to try the 'unofficial-lmde-xfce'

being lmde already (semi) rolling so it 'keeps on trukin' :lol:

built on xfce 4.10 (siductons xfcenext repo) and quite light.

J.Jay
P.S. search mints forum you'll find link http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=122592
perduta

Re: Light Weight LinuxMint for virtual machine

Post by perduta »

jjaythomas wrote:May want to try the 'unofficial-lmde-xfce'...
Thanks for that info. the torrent worked fine... the installation was problem free.

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sudo mint-choose-debian-mirror
sudo apt-get update
... no problem and I then installed the guest additions which also seem to be working.

The rolling Debian distribution should also be an asset as I won't need to worry whether it's a long term service release and can simply disable automatic updates until I need them.

Notes for anyone else doing this:
I chose a 32Gig vdi disk as it is possible to resize those later although I prefer to make different snapshots of the same base machine with different toolsets.
ext2 was preferable to ext3/4 because 'journaling' seems redundant for my virtual machine as it can be restored to a known good snapshot if anything goes wrong.
(My variable file data invariably will be destined for a shared folder on the host machine).

p.s. I can't work out how to make it log me in automatically atm: does anyone know why the check box is greyed out?
Last edited by perduta on Mon Jan 28, 2013 7:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
perduta

Re: Light Weight LinuxMint for virtual machine

Post by perduta »

perduta wrote:p.s. I can't work out how to make it log me in automatically atm: does anyone know why the check box is greyed out?
... apparently it's a known bug with Debian distro's. They advise editing

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gksu gedit /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf
... but there is no such file and not even a folder of that name and creating one didn't work...
- sigh - :(

edit: DW I found it ... /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
emperor_aniseed

Re: Light Weight LinuxMint for virtual machine

Post by emperor_aniseed »

If you're prepared to do a bit of jiggery pokery, you could get the old CrunchBang script (from when CrunchBang was based on Ubuntu) to stick on top of Ubuntu minimal (whichever release you prefer) and Mintify it. It's no longer official/maintained but most importantly: "It works!" There exists a Mint Openbox theme although I'm not sure if this comes in the openbox-themes package or if you'll need to pillage the #! Waldorf repository for it. Will be light enough for VirtualBox, though.

Note that I don't provide the link. That's because while I think it might fit what you want to do, it's not really current and CrunchBang is now Debian-based. So I don't want to advertise it for general use. Should be easy to find though.
perduta

Re: Light Weight LinuxMint for virtual machine

Post by perduta »

emperor_aniseed wrote:If you're prepared to do a bit of jiggery pokery, you could get the old CrunchBang script...
That's interesting... I see there is a current website http://crunchbang.org promising a "modern full featured Linux experience" and boasting a devoted "#! community", but its grey on more shades of grey looks to me well a bit like a drab and dreary undertakers convention where a gloomy looking vulture logo would actually liven things up a bit :O

However joking aside... I did give it a look but my conclusion is that I am completely overwhelmed now by the sheer number of Linux distros.

Yet they all seem to be promising the same things just with a different color scheme and I really can't see what would make one preferable to the other. As far as "look and feel" goes, I quite like the fresh green mintyness of Linux Mint and I am finding it easy to find what I want (for a change) ! :)
You know, not a single distro in all this profusion is aimed specifically at my application: a basic no-nonsense virtual machine on which I can install just the package(s) I want and leaving my screen savers and office suites and temperature sensing power deamons, email programs, user account management and trendy fly-by-night gizmos to my host OS. Maybe I should be making a distro of my own in case others want a guest appliance OS, but I've turfed out most of the stuff I don't need from LMDE and it's good enough to get my job done. :arrow:
emperor_aniseed

Re: Light Weight LinuxMint for virtual machine

Post by emperor_aniseed »

No, I wasn't trying to sell you CrunchBang, which in my opinion is better than what I was actually suggesting i.e. something Ubuntu-based and looking like Mint. There's a Mint openbox theme. You run the Ubuntu minimal install and once it's loaded use wget to pull in the script which you then run. It comes from the days of Gnome 2 so even though it works now it looks for Gnome 2 (only for the login screen) and doesn't find it. Perhaps installing gnome-panel would also help.

CrunchBang was based on Ubuntu up until 9 and then decided to move to a Debian base, a bit like if Mint was now only the Debian Edition.

Madbox is also Openbox and like Mint is based on Ubuntu. It's... ok but I think the language set-up is not without flaws.

Essentially you'll get more mileage out of non-3D DE's in VirtualBox and for some reason the last time I tried it Xfce it was not so hot either. Really, I'd recommend LXDE, which includes openbox, or pure openbox, for VirtualBox.
perduta

Re: Light Weight LinuxMint for virtual machine

Post by perduta »

emperor_aniseed wrote: Essentially you'll get more mileage out of non-3D DE's in VirtualBox and for some reason the last time I tried it Xfce it was not so hot either. Really, I'd recommend LXDE, which includes openbox, or pure openbox, for VirtualBox.
This is the sort of advise I need, and why I posted here :)

The only reason I was drawn to Linux Mint is that it appears to be gaining in popularity and most give it thumbs up.
However I have in fact now dropped the LMDE and xfce varieties of Linux Mint: On those, a tool I need called 'glade' crashes with segmentation fault.
It does NOT crash on the MATE version of Linux Mint.
I just wish I could understand why there even are all these different denominations of Linux... IMO it's a counter productive dissipation of effort.

LXDE is targeted at low power cloud computing which in a way is similar to what I want but has a lot of stuff I don't need:

[*] power management to conserve the battery - mine has no battery.
[*] security and multi-user capability... - mine should just run as a generic guest on the assumption that whoever is using the host has already been authorized
[*] all sorts of pre-installed packages - i will only want one tool set on any particular machine. ATM I want one for building apps from source.
[*] International packages - honestly I'm quite happy with just English I may make a machine specifically for testing i18n/l10n issues, but in general won't need it.

Immediately I am confronted with choice: which LXDE I should try.
[*] Debian GNU/Linux 6.0
[*] Fedora LXDE Spin
[*] Lubuntu 12.10
[*] openSUSE 11.4

I could try them all, but look how many days I've already wasted setting things up on LMDE before discovering that it simply doesn't work properly :(
What is there to recommend Fedora over SUSE for instance?
I won't touch Ubuntu with a barge pole having previously had major problems when they bring out a new release and this was also my concern with Linux Mint being based on Ubuntu but at least they got rid of the Unity thing. I like the 'rolling release' principle of Debian and the fact they release when it's ready and not to an arbitrary schedule... bug fixes and new add-on packages is one thing but I really don't see why we need all these never ending releases. So I'll give the Debian version a try and if it segmentation errors then I'm sticking with MATE... warts and all ;)
perduta

Re: Light Weight LinuxMint for virtual machine

Post by perduta »

perduta wrote:
emperor_aniseed wrote:Really, I'd recommend LXDE, which includes openbox, or pure openbox, for VirtualBox.
... So I'll give the Debian version a try and if it segmentation errors then I'm sticking with MATE... warts and all ;)
Correction... when trying to download it I get:

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Not Found

The requested URL /debian-cd/current-live/i386/iso-hybrid/debian-live-6.0.5-i386-lxde-desktop.iso was not found on this server.
So IMO that kind of epitomizes what's happening to Linux. :(

p.s. Note: I also googled 'openbox'

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Openbox is a highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support... GNOME/Openbox, KDE/Openbox... 
So there is also a 'pure openbox'... and I'm not even going to ask what the difference is. After several days of trying to make sense of it I find that what works today could all change tomorrow and so if something works that will do. Thus I'm sticking with Linux Mint MATE and as for pluma editor being unable to save files on the virtual box shared folder I simply uninstalled it and install mousepad instead because that does work just fine. :?
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