How to set up a Virtual Machine?
 

I'm a relative noob when it comes to Linux and I'm in the process of trying to decide which distribution to install on my machine. One recommendation I received was to set up a virtual machine so I could try several distros without having to install them.

This sounds a whole lot like the old "DOS box" that one could open with OS/2, which became a virtual DOS machine. But I've never tried doing this with anything else but OS/2. Is a virtual machine something I can set up in Win7, and then run a Linux distro from -- within Win7? Or is this something else entirely? Boot the machine with a Linux CD and then run the distros maybe?

In your reply, I'd ask you to please keep in mind that I don't know diddly about how Linux works. I keep trying to apply DOS concepts to Linux and it ties my brain into knots.

Take a look at VirtualBox.

Thanks, Granth! I'm editing this post cuz I just d/l'd and installed VirtualBox. This has to be one of the coolest apps I've seen in a long time! The possibilities! I've got some old Linux distro CDs that are probably 16, 17 year old that I never really did anything with, and it looks like I can run them from this box. Just for grins, more than anything else, I'm thinking. If they're still any good, that is. I've got CDs from at least one software publisher that have gone bad after only four and five years.

For sure I'm gonna try out some of my old s/w, see if I can still get it to work.

Yes, almost every task you learned in dos and windows has a similar concept in linux. Just learn the name change usually.

A virtual machine is a software copy of a real computer. Think of it just like you would a real computer. See this for an example. http://jpc.sourceforge.net/demos_linuxdemos.html Although that is based on a web access, the real vm will be a software you install to windows. It is like any other windows application where you start it and stop it. You can switch between windows and such.

Like I wrote before, I'm not unused to the concept. OS/2 had a pretty cool DOS box option. The OS/2 DOS box actually ran DOS programs better than DOS did (less overhead). Plus you never had to worry about your machine getting infected by a virus your DOS box might have caught. But that was the extent of my knowledge on the subject. Well, almost. One of the features of OS/2, since Warp v3.0 was supposedly it ran Windows 3.1 because there was actually some Win3.1 code in Warp 3.0, as a result of the early cooperation of Microsoft with the "open standard" that OS/2 was supposed to become. In reality, while Warp ran 3.1 sort of, the 3.1 GUI was ghastly and as a result nobody I knew of actually used it. But it didn't matter to M$ because when Warp v3 was released, M$ backed out of the project, did a complete 180, and pulled out all the stops trying to smear and sabotage OS/2 because they were busy with putting the finishing touches on Win95. OS/2 Warp v3 was released in 1994, a year before Win95 and at a point in time when pretty much everybody was sick and tired of Win3.1. It was a golden opportunity for IBM, but they folded and succumbed to M$ pressure such that OS/2 v4 was at best a half-hearted release and it died a slow, lingering death afterward. M$'s tactics succeeded, setting back the PC community almost a decade in terms of having a truly robust yet lean multitasking operating system, but M$ didn't care as long as they could strengthen their stranglehold on the market. Yeah, you could say I still have bad feelings about the whole deal. Their behaviour was unconscionable. I had one machine -- which was a three-node, 24/7/364 BBS -- that was 100% OS/2. It didn't have a scrap of M$ code on it anywhere -- that I knew of at least -- I think there was some M$ code in the CMOS of every PC that was sold for many years. Dunno if this is still the case. In fact, I read an article -- must have been back in the late 1980s that claimed that the reason for Microsoft's great wealth was not so much its sales of Windows and its office products, but the fact that the company got like $0.50 or something from every PC sold, regardless of its OS, because of the scrap of MS code embedded into its CMOS. But I'm digressing rather badly. Where was I? Oh!

This VirtualBox thing though, it is way cool. I've got a copy of Bodhi Linux running in it right now. Gonna have to kill it and start over again. I allocated 8 GB, but it's saying I have 600MB and it's full. Rosegarden errored out on installation, so it probably needed more than 600MB. Strange why it didn't set up 8GB though. I've got 194 GB free on the drive, so it can't be a lack of space issue.

One of the cool things I noticed right off about Bodhi Linux is they list a bunch of apps at their website that are available for download through them, and for audio editing packages, one of the packages they listed was Rosegarden, which is the program I've been wanting to try out. So Bodhi Linux has immediately gotten on my good side by offering those apps. And I gotta say the GUI -- or shell or whatever -- is very nice looking. I went with the "Moonbean" skin, I think it was called. Love that clock!

I've got a steep learning curve ahead of me. There are immediately in front of you sets of dropdowns and most of them I have no idea what they're for or what they mean. A lot of it is because they use acronyms and abbreviations for terms that I'm not familiar with anyway, so I'm lost at being lost right now. It'll get better though. I keep telling myself that I should learn Linux the same way I learned how to use a PC. I was very app-specific in the beginning. This was back in the early 1980s when the IBM XT was high tech (XT ran at 4.77 MHz, had 640kb of RAM, one 5-1/4" floppy, a 20MB hard drive, and a 16-color EGA graphics card and monitor). I knew how to run spreadsheet, word processing, and graphics software, and that was it. I didn't know the first thing about DOS for quite some time. Nonetheless, as I become comfortable with the interface I began to reach out to discover more and before too long I was comfortable with virtually all aspects of the PC-DOS environment.

Slowly making progress! Yay!

Lotus 123
 

Do you have Lotus 123 ( a spreadsheet).The size of software was 1.2 mb.

Actually, no. Instead of Lotus 123, which was very expensive back in the day, on my personal PC I ran Borland's Quatro Pro. It is now a Corel product (and has been for over 20 years now, if I have my dates right) and is distributed in Corel's WordPerfect Office Suite. Quatro Pro was a close clone of Lotus 123. It would do everything 123 did, even had a very similar user interface, but it was much cheaper. Of course, nowadays, whenever anyone thinks of spreadsheet software, immediately they think of Microsoft's Excel. Excel has always been a Windows product, so it's always had the much slicker looking WYSIWYG interface that the old DOS 123 lacked. But guess what? Most of Excel's shortcut key commands -- they're all copied from Lotus 123.

Incidentally, if you shift gears and run your wayback machine all the way back to the early 1980s, Lotus 123 was distributed on 360k 5-1/4" floppies. So was its upscale cousin, Lotus Symphony, which is the product that was used where I worked. Symphony was basically a gussied up 123 with added integrated graphics (line, bar, and pie charts), a comm section for modem connections, a basic word processor, and a relatively simple database. That was quite a bit to shoehorn onto a 360k disk, but Lotus managed to do it.

The high-density 1.2mb install disks didn't come into general use until the late 80s, even though the 1.2mb disks has been around as long as the IBM AT had (about 1983 or so?). The problem was the huge installed base of the older 8088 machines, which would only handle the 360k floppies. Take me as an example: I owned an XT clone - an 8088, and it was my main computer until 1991, when I bought a 486 -- which still had a 5.25" drive, albeit a 1.2mb one. The 1.2mb floppies were in turn phased out by the early-to-mid 90s as software publishers began to put everything on CD-ROM.

I figure I should bring y'all up current since I started this thread and all.

I decided yesterday to go with Bodhi Linux, which is a shell using Ubuntu's tried-and-true v12.04. One of the nice things about the Bodhi distribution is its low overhead requirements, and its relatively small footprint on the hard drive once it's been installed.

Tonight I installed it and I was pleasantly surprised that the disk first booted up with Bodhi just loaded into memory, providing me with the option of taking it for a test drive before I installed it. I don't recall other distributions doing this, but the last time I played around with one was almost four years ago, so I'm sure a lot has changed. So what this amounted to was a virtual box, which is the topic of this thread, as you might recall. So if all or most all of the distributions do this sort of thing, then there really isn't much of a need for a virtual box, is there. Although I'd have to burn a CD for each distro this way, whereas with the VirtualBox I wouldn't. So, yeah, I guess the VB still makes the most sense.