Will Mint Linux light run a T43?

[DaveG11th]

total Linux newbie here, combined with long-time-no-CDROM-recording schnook --

Will Mint light work on a T43 2372-K1U? (don't need the fingerprint dealie or the bluetooth, but must have wireless.)

Or, failing that, will the Mint 5.1 iso (showing up in Explorer as 707,436 KB) fit on a 700 MB CDR?

Or should I just find higher-capacity CDRs and go with the full release?

[maciejs]

total Linux newbie here, combined with long-time-no-CDROM-recording schnook --

Will Mint light work on a T43 2372-K1U? (don't need the fingerprint dealie or the bluetooth, but must have wireless.)

it will run like there's no tomorrow, with bluetooth and wireless out of the box; fingerprint reader will work as well if you fancy doing some configuration here and there; i'd go for full version to save you some hassle installing stuff later on

i run mint 5.1 on x30 and am VERY happy with it... will be switching to 6 soon i guess; obviously t43 has a lot more steam than x30

Or, failing that, will the Mint 5.1 iso (showing up in Explorer as 707,436 KB) fit on a 700 MB CDR?

Or should I just find higher-capacity CDRs and go with the full release?

it will fit onto normal CDR just fine, both light and full versions, don't you worry (-;

[DaveG11th]

Thanks, maciejs - that was quick.

After poking around in the wine.org forums, it seems a friendly world.

My foray into Mint/Linux will likely begin after the first of the year (crazy workload just now). Last week, I went through an unforgettable, 'anomalous' Windows Re-Activation screw-up that lost me a day of work... after being a boy-scout, honest, everything-registered Microsoft user since 1993.

Although I must say, I'm not looking forward to the decisions - beginning with: WINE, or some other option, or forget my Windows apps? Can't really do the latter...

[carbon_unit]

Wine will run some things. Check the wine homepage for app compatibility. The things that won't run in wine will run in a virtual machine such as Virtualbox or VMware. With this you create a "virtual" machine and install Windows on it just like a regular machine. Then you install your apps on it normally.

[DaveG11th]

Well, Virtualbox has the right price, where VMware compounds the issue by failing to have a selector, or comparator, or even basic product Web page that tells me what product is right for me.

Are you saying that I would need to uninstall Windows XP Pro, install a virtual machine, then re-install Windows?

Oog. Hours of service pack and update upload & re-application + re-installation of my applications... hardware...

[maciejs]

Well, Virtualbox has the right price, where VMware compounds the issue by failing to have a selector, or comparator, or even basic product Web page that tells me what product is right for me.

Are you saying that I would need to uninstall Windows XP Pro, install a virtual machine, then re-install Windows?

Oog. Hours of service pack and update upload & re-application + re-installation of my applications... hardware...

You don't have to uninstall the XP that you already have there - you can setup your laptop to dual boot XP (that's already there) and Mint - it's taken care of during the Mint installation and it's a quite straightforward process.

Once you have Mint installed on your disk then you install Virtualbox/VMWare and you can put pretty much any OS in there - it's simply running a full operating system (in your case XP) inside another operating system (Mint). That would be totally seperate installation from the other XP instance your T43 has now. It's not really that difficult and you don't have to worry about drivers for your virtual machine, just install the system and run update.

I hope it's understandable (-;

[DaveG11th]

I hope it's understandable (-;

I *think* so. It sounds as though I have to have 2 disks/directories each with 1 full install of Windows XP -- am I seeing that right? One for dual boot, one for virtual machine use?

If so, I will have to look at HDD size, it would seem. The Winnt folder on my desktop right now is 7.6 GB in bloated size (laptop is out of reach, but it's fairly pristine, so I'd expect Winnt to be smaller).

[maciejs]

I hope it's understandable (-;

I *think* so. It sounds as though I have to have 2 disks/directories each with 1 full install of Windows XP -- am I seeing that right? One for dual boot, one for virtual machine use?

If so, I will have to look at HDD size, it would seem. The Winnt folder on my desktop right now is 7.6 GB in bloated size (laptop is out of reach, but it's fairly pristine, so I'd expect Winnt to be smaller).

well, you will have your existing XP installation on one partition, than you'll have another partition for mint and virtual machine will be installed on virtual disc (; which as far as host OS (Mint) is concerned is just a file;

indeed those virtual disk files tend to be quite large but you can set them up with dynamic size - let's say that you want to install XP on a virtual disk in Virtualbox so you should probably allocate at least 6-8gb for it, but if it's to be dynamically allocated the actuall file will only be as large as the space used by guest OS

to put this in example: you create a virtual disk, give it 8gb of space, 8gb is reported to guest OS but if the installation plus your files and software in the guest OS only take up 4gb the virtual disk file will only be 4gb of size

is that better? (:

[maciejs]

you should probably be more concerned with your RAM than disk space... each virtual machine will need "virtual RAM" allocated, so if you allocate 512mb of virtual RAM for XP (i wouldn't try with anything less... ) than the whole Virtualbox will need 512MB of normal RAM when running your virtual XP as well as at least 8mb of memory for the "virtual graphics card" (on top of what's it using already, which is not really that much... around 40mb i think, could be more)

I wouldn't try toying with virtualization if your hardware (CPU and RAM) is not capable of running two operating systems at once, essentially... virtual machines are generally slightly less resource hungry than the same OS running directly on the same hardware but they still require quite a lot of power to run smoothly

bottom line is that you should be fine on your T43 as long as you have at least 1-1.5gb of RAM... at work I run Windows 2k3 in Virtualbox on P4 2.8 GHz with 1.25gb RAM and it's perfectly fine (both guest and host with a number of other things running) - host is XP Pro, linux as a host would probably be doing a little bit better

at home on my Asus A6jm (Core Duo 1.8GHz and 2GB of ram) I can run Windows 2k8 with 1gb virtual RAM, Mint 5.1 is hosting it

[maciejs]

Well, Virtualbox has the right price, where VMware compounds the issue by failing to have a selector, or comparator, or even basic product Web page that tells me what product is right for me.

and about that, you can have VMWare Player (i think that's the name) for free but it can only run the existing virtual machines so you won't be able to install new OSs with that, there's also 30 days trial of full blown VMWare Workstation and that's enterprise-grade virtualization solution, you can install any system in that - that's pretty much it for VMWare, desktop wise

I'd go for Virtualbox if I were you, it's slightly slower than VMWare and doesn't have that many options but it's easy to use and does have everything you may need, it's also freeware (opensource version without USB support exist as well)

[DaveG11th]

Thanks once again, maciejs, for the help -- by the way, I just noticed a slight typo in my OP - my laptop is a T42, not T43.

The current 60 gig drive might not be enough. And, the 1 GB RAM will have to be looked at as well, since it's 2-512 MB modules -- thanks for bringing that up, as I would not have factored it in.

[carbon_unit]

The concept of virtual machines is difficult to grasp.
Basically you are allocating resources for use in the Virtual machine. For example if you create a virtual hard drive of 10gb it is not immediately subtracted from the usable size of the hard drive. It simply means that the virtual drive can use no more than 10gb, but if you are only using 5gb the other 5gb is available for other uses. The same with memory. If the virtual machine guest is not running the memory is used for the host OS.
Essentially the entire machine is created within a single file which will be the size of the used part of the virtual hard drive.
With a 60gb hard drive you should be able to use 25gb for Linux. Within that you could use 15gb for the Virtual XP installation.
I run Quickbooks this way every day since there is no Quickbooks for Linux. QB is the only Windows app I need to run. I never boot into my old XP installation. I run Linux full time and use VirtualBox to run QB. I also use VirtualBox to test live cd ISO's without burning then to a cd.