(If you use 32-bit, change things accordingly.)
This post is about how to circumvent potential problems by
- manual partitioning of the virtual harddrive
- installing guest additions
This post assumes basic knowledge of
- Virtual Box
- How to launch programs from the commandline in Mint
If somebody has just a quick question about it (even though most can be googled),just ask.
This is a little advice for those who may be new to linux-Mint (and especially Mint-Debian) and might get "stuck" trying to install.
...this is a peace of cake for the more experienced ones of course -
my intention is to enable the curious newbies to try this marvellous distro.
OK, so let's jump right in...
I created a new virtual machine and new virtual hard drive (8 GB).
It occurred to me that it is NOT straight forward to install LMDE on the virtual hard drive (out of the life system):
After launching the installer when it comes to the harddrive and partitioning, it does not recognize the hard drive - AS LONG AS the "virgin" hard drive does not have a partition table at all (even with no entries).
Therefore, I launched gparted (as sudo, from a command line. May work out of the menu as well). I left the installer open in the meantime. in gparted, I created an empty partition table (I also created the partitions to use later - just "/" (root), size 7 GB and swap, rest=1GB). After that, I closed gparted and swiched back to installer.
EDIT: As a file System for "/", use ext4 or ext3 I suggest. The ext2 suggested by default has more issues/potential data loss in the case of a system crash (aka it is "no journalling file system")
I then refreshed the hard drive reading in the installer - and the partitions appeared. I double clicked the one I wanted to assign to "/" and selected accordingly.
Only then could the install continue.
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To make full use of virtualbox, one has to install the special drivers: guest-additions.
To do this, from the Virtal machine menus, lanuch "install guest additions". This will "mount a virtual CDROM".
Again, I found it not straight forward to actually launch the installer:
You need to be root (or possibly do it as sudo). I launched from the command line as root
Code: Select all
sh /media/cdrom0/VBoxLinuxAdditions-amd64.run
(1) if you tried it as sudo, you would have to type "sudo" in front of the actual command.
(2) The "sh" seemed necessary, otherwise there was a file permission issue in my case.
EDIT: Occasionally, using the *sudo* method, I have huge display issues (completely garbled guest screen) while installing guest additions in Debian/Ubuntu/Derivative-guests.
After all, a new video driver is installed...
SOOO, if you open a root shell by typing su from the command line, this shell will *not be X enabled*, which means, all commands you do on this shell will do no immediate harm to your display function. That is exactly what we want during the guest additions install. Therefore, I hereby recommend to become root-proper (the command prompt should then be a #) before launching guest additions install script. /EDIT
Guest Additions will then install better video drivers and tools to allow copy/paste and other things between your computer (aka "host") and the virtual machine running inside it.
Reboot and you will have a nice system!
I hope this helps somebody.
To All: Enjoy this great distro!
Merry Christmas.