What OS for VM practice machine?

opethdisciple · 1 Nov 2015 at 15:51

I'm planning on setting up a pc at home for study purposes.

I'm going to be working towards studying for the LPIC (Linux) and Cisco CCNA certifications.

I know the hardware I want (AMD 8320, 16Gb Ram etc) it's going to be a cheap and cheerful build for running VM's.

However what O.S to use? I was thinking Ubuntu for Linux familiarity as well as cheap.

However for things like running Transcender training programs and practice exams, I don't think Transcender is Linux compatible, so it looks like Win 10...

Any thoughts?

lamboman · 1 Nov 2015 at 16:13

Personally I'd use CentOS 6.7 or 7 along with MATE as a desktop environment if you need one. Easy to set up, just works. With Ubuntu you'll probably find Unity doesn't run that well in a VM and you'll have to install additional bits and pieces (SSH etc). If you're going to do some additional setup at the start, might as well pick the distro that gives you the least work to get it up and running. Also, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS uses Upstart, not systemd, which might be a point of contention (and not really worth using).

opethdisciple · 1 Nov 2015 at 17:44

Thanks that makes sense. I was Googling around to see how you install GNS3 for the Cisco on Ubuntu but it seemed fairly involved. Will it be easier in Centos as you suggested above?

Still small problem of a few things like Transcender only working in windows.

---

Edit.

If I was to install Centos now and study my Linux, if later on down the line I wanted to dual boot, can I install win 10 and dual boot both centos and win 10?

Edit 2

Is it necessary to install MATE? Whats the advantage of installing this over the standard Centos desktop environment?

lamboman · 1 Nov 2015 at 23:29

opethdisciple said:
Thanks that makes sense. I was Googling around to see how you install GNS3 for the Cisco on Ubuntu but it seemed fairly involved. Will it be easier in Centos as you suggested above?

No idea when it comes to the actual GNS3 installation process, it's not an application I know anything about. I'd presume it'd be as difficult. The primary reason I suggested CentOS is because if a business is not using RHEL, they're probably using CentOS. As it is an older release it's likely to be less hassle than the closer-to-bleeding edge world of Ubuntu. It's just a good distro to familiarise yourself with, and things are less likely to be broken from the get-go, especially under a VM.

opethdisciple said:
If I was to install Centos now and study my Linux, if later on down the line I wanted to dual boot, can I install win 10 and dual boot both centos and win 10?

Yes. In fact, the installer should set everything up for you. Good opportunity to learn about bootloaders and BIOS/EFI too!

opethdisciple said:
Is it necessary to install MATE? Whats the advantage of installing this over the standard Centos desktop environment?

Standard CentOS desktop environment uses GNOME 3 but running in legacy mode, which is still horrifically slow. MATE is essentially the official continuation of GNOME 2, and runs nicely under a VM with no hardware acceleration. Not 100% necessary, just my recommendation. It'd take you an extra three minutes to install following a guide such as this: http://www.45drives.com/wiki/index.php/Installing_MATE_on_CentOS_7 (you don't need to do the last step though).

opethdisciple · 2 Nov 2015 at 17:20

I read online that the right way round is to install windows first then linux, however is it possible to install linux first then windows and still be able to boot in to the linux partition?

stopper · 2 Nov 2015 at 17:43

lamboman said:
Yes. In fact, the installer should set everything up for you.

Not yet with Win10.
Right now Linux (debian distros at least) only recognizes Win10 as a recovery partition and not an OS install.
So you have to manually partition the HDD in Windows, then set a mount point on the free space during the Linux install, under the "some thing else" option.

lamboman · 2 Nov 2015 at 19:56

I'm running Ubuntu 15.10 and all worked without issue IIRC (despite only installing last week I don't actually remember whether or not I reconfigured grub, foolish I know). I'm fairly sure that os-prober did pick up Windows 10 without issue.

Regardless, yes, easiest way is to install Windows first then install Linux afterwards. The bootloaders on the Linux side are intelligent enough to see the Windows bootloader and chainload, something that the Windows bootloader doesn't do the other way round. Honestly though, grub is easy to configure anyway, as long as you actually bother reading the configuration file properly!