Best Distro + VM software combo?

Chris1712 · 14 Oct 2008 at 13:15

Hey guys, I'm back at uni and fancy having Linux on my home desktop. I already have it on my laptop which i use at uni for all my coding etc.. whilst there, but its a waste using it at home when I've got a nice big screen and real keyboard I could be using on my desktop.

So I'm looking for firstly a lightweight distro. On my laptop i have Ubuntu with compiz everything and lots of silly effects, and I love it. However, i don't need this on my desktop! All i will be doing is coding, using probably emacs for VHDL, kate for c/c++ and compiling with gnu command line compilers, and debugging with GVD!
Any recommendations? A good packet manager is a must for me, after being spoiled with apt-get for so long. Xubuntu? TinyME looks good?

ALSO, i want it to run in a VM in Windows. Whats good nowadays? I used to run Ubuntu inside Parallels on my MacBook Pro, and it worked very well, anything similiar for Vista x64? I guess this is where I'm going to have problems? It needs to be able to share my network connection for packet updates, and be nicely scalable to my screen (!600x1200), other than that i don't need it to be playing videos or anything.

SO, linux gurus of OcUK, what what?

pingwing · 14 Oct 2008 at 14:32

One answer Gentoo!

I know it always is touted as the most daunting distro "for the hard core only" and such likes, but it can be light weight (aka being clever with what you install) it by default comes with a compiler (as you use it to do the original install

), it can be set up for your coding needs (not something in that good at but there should be plent of resourses on the web) and above all else portage is the best package management system out there! (i like it more than apt-get, even with some compile times)

For the VM side there are only 2 real options (in my opinion!!) either VMware or (my preffered) VurtualBox (which is free from sun). I think both can do parallels style merger with windows which is quite cool (but is sort of useless if your running just a command line linux)

Anyway, hope thats good/useful (and fun) solution

rsatd · 14 Oct 2008 at 16:48

pingwing said:
One answer Gentoo!

Yep, second Gentoo

Chris1712 · 14 Oct 2008 at 17:27

Unfortunately its to late lol. I grabbed a pre VM'd ubuntu and its working a treat. I'm actually amazed at how quickly it works with VMware.

Works just fine for me, only really using Kate for C programming at the moment, will be using Emacs for VHDL in the coming weeks and I'm sure this will be more than adequate.