Help Me Test Drive Mint Please

[sithlord48]

@elijathegold , you don't need to use pv for progress use dd's status as part of your command

status=LEVEL
The LEVEL of information to print to stderr; 'none' suppresses
everything but error messages, 'noxfer' suppresses the final
transfer statistics, 'progress' shows periodic transfer
statistics

example :
~: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=4M status=progress

[elijathegold]

@elijathegold , you don't need to use pv for progress use dd's status as part of your command


example :
~: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=4M status=progress

Yeah, that's pretty new; coreutils 8.24 or later. *buntu 14.04 has 8.21 and 16.04 has coreutils 8.25.

[oldgeek]

I have just tried out the latest Oracle Virtual Box with its extension pack and have finally gotten it to work. My problem at first was trying to install from a USB iso image which for some reason Kubuntu 16.04 couldn't read. Fortunately I have the iso images saved on my hard disk and just started making the virtual machine all over again (doesn't take very long) and trusted that I wasn't wiping out my hard disk in the process. The first iso I tried was Peppermint 7 32-bit, since I had already installed it on my netbook and had a good idea of how it worked. No problems! It can even be tried out before installing, just like a live disk. Next I tried Linux Mint 18 (Cinnamon, which I like) and that works well too except for an error message informing me that video acceleration isn't working so it will use more CPU. Haven't tried to debug that yet. Finally, I downloaded the user's version of KDE Neon, which everyone seems to be raving about, but didn't install it, just tried it. The display is smaller than the others, and there are no programs to download in Discover. It wouldn't boot the next time I tried it, saying there was no boot device available. I got it working again by adding a new vm for Neon and going through the steps again. As I said, it doesn't take long. I agree that virtual boxes are highly addictive once you get the idea, and are quite a bit easier than trying new releases out on my little Atom-powered netbook. Thanks for all the tips, including Elijah's blog, which I checked out AFTER I had already spent hours trying to get Virtual Box to work. Now it does, and it's new toy.

[elijathegold]

Next I tried Linux Mint 18 (Cinnamon, which I like) and that works well too except for an error message informing me that video acceleration isn't working so it will use more CPU. Haven't tried to debug that yet.

You probably need to enable 3D acceleration in the display settings of the VM. This gives it access to the the 3D capabilities on your computer.

Finally, I downloaded the user's version of KDE Neon, which everyone seems to be raving about, but didn't install it, just tried it. The display is smaller than the others, and there are no programs to download in Discover.

The display size is usually because there is not enough video ram configured for the machine. Again under the display settings, I always it up to the maximum of 128MB for desktop operating systems and leave it at the default for servers. As for the lack of software, there is probably a button to refresh the repositories in Discover, but you can just run sudo apt update from the terminal.

[oldgeek]

You probably need to enable 3D acceleration in the display settings of the VM. This gives it access to the the 3D capabilities on your computer.

Did that, but still got the error message. Doesn't seem to affect the running of the OS, though.


The display size is usually because there is not enough video ram configured for the machine. Again under the display settings, I always it up to the maximum of 128MB for desktop operating systems and leave it at the default for servers. As for the lack of software, there is probably a button to refresh the repositories in Discover, but you can just run sudo apt update from the terminal.

Changed the video ram from 16 to 128, and that did the trick. However, ran sudo apt update but it didn't fix the lack of software. Thought maybe I had to install it to the VM first, but aborted that when my Home Folder got too full ().