Linux Mint in Virtual

[buster]

Being very impressed by Jason's presentation at the September meeting, I installed next morning Linux Mint on VMWare, with Win10 as a host .

The host machine has a strong Intel core 5, and 8 gigs ram, so no problem here.
Gave the Mint guest 2 gigs ram, and 2 cores as I do for all guests.

Had the usual easy install as with all Ubuntu derivatives, and got the theme that Jason had demonstrated at the meeting. It looked good and ran quickly. Added qBittorrent, TuxRacer and Kpat - these seem to be good 'test' software for a virtual machine.

QBittorrent worked well when I figured out that I needed to do a right click on magnet link to get the torrent to the software, rather than the usual left click. Quirky but fine. TuxRacer was excellent. Smooth and crystal clear. At the end of a won Kpat solitaire game, the cards flip around the screen. I guess it's a victory dance. The graphics did not handle that well at all, yet Ubuntu Mate, in virtual on the same Win10, handles it perfectly.

But that's not the real problem. With a couple of installs of Ubuntu Mate, drag and drop between guest and host worked automatically and perfectly. With Linux Mint I never got it working. (And I don't have a good reason to spend much of the limited time I have left on earth to solve this problem.) And I use the drag and drop a lot.

So a lovely system for a dual boot, or a whole hard drive, but not an improvement on Ubuntu Mate for me in Virtual.

[fox]

I was interested in Mint a few years ago, and I had it on my "distro laptop" for awhile. I never found any major differences between it and Ubuntu until they started using different desktops. There are also design differences, and I never found any of the stock Mint design to be aesthetically pleasing until Jason's presentation. (Loved those tabs in the bottom bar!) I also found differences in battery life, with Ubuntu being better. Since I prefer Unity and Gnome to Cinnamon and Mate, I haven't given Mint a try in a long time. But Budgie is a nice, aesthetically pleasing desktop, and with the latest version sporting the option for a vertical bar, it's nice to know that it works on both Ubuntu and Mint.

[buster]

Rejoice Mint lovers who want to use virtual! Got up this morning and thought Ubuntu Mate must have installed something automatically that Mint didn't during the install. Seems so obvious now.

Opened both virtual machines on my desktop side by side, opened Synaptic in both, and checked Mate for any programs that might be connected to VMWare, Guest or Tools. And there were two in Mate not installed in Mint.

Clicked the two empty selection boxes in mint and installed them, and Voila! after a reboot of Mint, the drag and drop worked.

And something special for this old cowboy who's never done it before, I could drag and drop between 2 virtual machines.

Next maybe I'll see if I can get both TuxRacers started down the bunny hill, side by side so to speak, with no guidance, and see who stays on the course longer. A serious pursuit for the inquiring mind.

[fox]

And something special for this old cowboy who's never done it before, I could drag and drop between 2 virtual machines.

Neat; I've never done that before! What two programs did you have to install?

[buster]

open-vm-tools
open-vm-tools-desktop

Also a search for 'vmware' in Synaptic will narrow it down a lot.

Checked to see if there was something similar for VirtualBox but came up with too much, and none of it seemed as straightforward.

[fox]

Interestingly enough, adding those two files to my distro (Ubuntu 17.04) made the drag and drop function work in a Virtualbox vm I set up with Windows 7. I could never get that function to work before. Thanks, Harry!

[Jason]

Nicely done, Harry!