Hi. I want to run linux within win7. It sounded like it should be pretty easy with VirtualBox, but I've tried several recent versions of Ubuntu and they all seem to have problems.

Can anybody suggest a nice, easy to setup and easy to use, solid distro to run under VirtualBox or something similar?

Thanks!

Hmmm - maybe OpenSuSE.
I have run Arch for years under VBox on Win7. If I get bored overnight I'll try OpenSuSE for you. If I can remember why I would want to run Win7 ....

BTW - I am not suggesting Arch meets your criteria.

from within a running windows 7 operating system

use a VM like VB

however , if you use OpenSUSE 12.3 ( the current )
it REQUIRES a LOT of system resources
The Gnome3 desktop needs a 3d card installed ( a chip on the MOBO will mostly do )
The KDE 4 DE also needs a good system to run well

SUSE is a bit bloated
I like to describe it as :
" --- Novell tossed in EVERYTHING including "the kitchen sink " , and for good measure they also tossed in your neighbors "kitchen sink" --- "

do not get me wrong , i like OpenSUSE , and it has a longer lifespan than Fedora .

though it is a bit too GUI centric
for most things it is normally easier to use the gui tools than the terminal .
There are some exceptions but for the most part you do not have to touch the terminal a lot
unless you want to like i do

Hi, you could try Puppy Linux, you won't have to install on your system anything save from a file with your personal settings and configurations and you won't need to use Virtualbox at all

Consider downloading pre-made virtual appliances. Some distro's offer them directly. Some web sites offer them although they are usually a bit older versions.

One might even be able to use a hybrid iso or usb image to run a vm and then make a few mods.

I think a lot of my problems were due to VirtualBox. I had tried puppy under it and it didn't work then did a clean install of VirtualBox on a different pc and the exact same puppy distro worked great!

Thanks everybody.

I don't know if this would be called heresy to the opensource community, but you can also try VMWare player since it's free. I've been using it to practice some RedHat stuff using CentOS and it installed with zero problems.

Nothing wrong with a good product like vmware's vmplayer.

If you want to run something with desktop effects enabled or that uses 3D I would even recommend to use VMware, its 3D support is better (faster, more supported features) and almost any distro comes with video drivers for VMware products by default.

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I was going to say VirtualBox... but it seems, as you said, you are having problems with it. Have you attempted to diagnosis it on your computer? You may want to try an older build or take a look at their community and see if anyone else has had any problems similar to yours. As far as an Linux OS goes... my choice is Debian.

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I would suggest trying VMWare also -- tests seem to find it out performs VirtualBox (I didn't find that under debian for some reason so I'm running VB).
As to the distro -- I would go for something with XFCE or LXDE as a desktop so the easiest should be either Xubuntu, Lubuntu or Linux Mint XFCE or LXDE versions. The more modern desktops (Unity [Ubuntu], Gnome and KDE) tend to use hardware acceleration and can be a a little troublesome in virtual machines though I find Unity is the worst, followed for some reason by Gnome though others may find different.

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Try LXLE (on SourceForge). It runs the LXDE version of Ubuntu LTS (12.04). It's lightweight, but has a lot of stuff in it and installs really easy. I installed it under VirtualBox on my very busy 2009 vintage iMac and it works very nicely. A full distro like Ubuntu or OpenSUSE seems to have issues because of resource needs. FYI, I only allocated 1GB of RAM for the VM, but that seems to be enough.