When deciding to setup a virtual machine, there are basically three choices. There is Virtual Box, VMware and Parallels. My personal favorite is Virtual Box, it's free and easy to setup. VMware Player is also free, but has a few more steps involved to get it up and running. Parallels is great, but costs $79.99 for the Windows version, which only gets you one license.
I'll tell you how to get started with Virtual Box. First, download Virtual Box here Then, you need to determine what flavor of Linux you want to try. There are so many versions and releases of Linux that you will be overwhelmed at first. A good place to start is www.distrowatch.com where you will find tons of linux distributions and screenshots, etc. To start with, I suggest Linux Mint, which you can download by clicking here. When prompted, choose to Save the file and remember where you saved it. Once the download is complete, open Virtual Box and the Wizard will walk you through the setup. You will be prompted to choose the Storage location of the Linux Mint.iso file that you saved earlier. Then, just click Start and your virtual machine will be up and running. In the future you can download as many .iso files as you want and edit the settings of Virtual Box to boot from any of the .iso files that you have saved on your pc.
If you would like to give Linux a try without using a virtual machine, you can burn the .iso image to a cd or dvd and run it live on any pc. There is a trick to doing this which drove me crazy several years ago when I first started playing around with linux. You must write the iso to a cd as an image and the best way that I have found to do this is using Infrarecorder and choosing write image, then select the .iso to burn.
Once you have the imaged burned to the cd, you can put it in the cd drive and reboot the computer. Note:If your computer is not already set to boot from the cd drive first, before the hard drive, then you will need to change that in the bios before it will work. If you would like to know how to boot linux from a usb flash drive you can email me and I will walk you through it.
Got a question? email me at thecommongeek@gmx.com
Brought to you by Dennis Keefe, The Common Geek
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