Test drive: Linux Mint 14 (live) on the EEEPC

I must reckon I haven't been recently paying much attention to new Linux releases. I so missed Linux Mint 14 release last November until some days ago. I so downloaded Linux Mint 14 “Nadia”, the one with Cinnamon 1.6 included, in order to give a look on how it would perform on my EEEPC 900. So after creating a bootable USB disk using Ubuntu's disk creator tool I restarted my netbook and started exploring the new Mint.

First impressions

Needless to say that Cinnamon, more than Mint itself, is the main object of my interest. I had been positively impressed from it while testing Mint 13 and the latest version only strengthened my opinion.

The EEEPC has been stable and responsive during all the time I tested Mint 14. Cinnamon settings are a bit improved over last version.

Virtualbox: The joy of virtualization

Among the many things I dreamed of before buying a new desktop one was being able to play with some virtualization software. A virtualization software is a program that allows you to set-up and run on your (physical) computer, usually called host computer, a virtual machine, called guest computer. The virtual computer can behave like a real computer and run a different operating system. Virtualbox is a virtualization software released by Oracle under GPL V2 license. I had already knew about Virtualbox since I use it at work and it has been literally life-saving in many occasions.

Installation and first machine

Installing Virtualbox is quite trivial: it is available in Ubuntu software centre repositories or it can be downloaded as “.deb” package (among other formats) from its download page. Once installed Virtualbox starts with the VM Manager window from here new virtual machines can be added and managed.