Testing Distros in VM

L.Jenkins

I hear all this craic about Manjaro so I'm going to give a try. I doubt I'll use it as an alternative to Fedora at the moment. Anyone test alternative distros in VM and which ones?

excollier

Too many to list - but at the moment I am testing Solaris Unix, Alpine Linux and Manjaro (with a very nice tiling window manager)

L.Jenkins

The version I grabbed came with XFCE and it looks nice. My last distro to test with FreeBSD. Not a big fan, but I would be inclined to use it again.

excollier

you could try Bunsen Labs, the successor to CrunchBang, very light and fast - I am using it as a dual boot with Mint 17.3 xfce at the moment.

PropJoe10

Yeah its a great way of testing out other distros. My main laptop runs Arch and I have Manjaro, Sparky and KaOS set up in Virtualbox, along with a Windows XP VM. Manjaro is pretty cool. Very polished and reliable.

L.Jenkins

This is why I feel VM software like Boxes and Virtualbox is the best thing since sliced bread. Try before you buy.

excollier

L.Jenkins wrote: »

..... Try before you buy.

Or make a donation to the distro if you keep it

L.Jenkins

Well yes, that's a given. I'd support Distros with smaller communities or more recently developed Distros.

human 19

PropJoe10 wrote: »

Yeah its a great way of testing out other distros. My main laptop runs Arch and I have Manjaro, Sparky and KaOS set up in Virtualbox, along with a Windows XP VM. Manjaro is pretty cool. Very polished and reliable.

I have a UBB stick which runs multisystem . Mostly I just drag ,n, drop an iso into it and can boot it from there. I have various backup and rescue distros on it and also use it to test live distros. Multisystem package can be downloaded and used on an ubuntu based distro, which sets up the stick as bootable with a multiboot option including whatever distros you put on it.

It means I dont have to worry about the testing limitations that come with virtualbox.

Edit: The main distro I use from the stick is qt4-fsarchiver whose main claim to fame is the ability to compress an backup partitions (and reinstall them afterwards if necessary after a borking incident) . Unlike clonezilla, it only copies the used data and not the empty space so the end partition can be smaller than the original.
I have even used this to migrate partitions from 1 HDD to another with the help of blkid and fstab

Worztron

A great distro to try in VirtualBox is Q4OS (based on Debian stable).