[Discuss] Light Linux Distro for VM usage

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Edward Ned Harvey <blu at nedharvey.com> wrote:
>
> There is no such thing as a "light" distro, if you want a desktop and a web
> browser with flash, etc. ?Your probable choices for a user-interface desktop
> would be Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint.
>
> You're running the linux machine in the VM guest, right? ?Not the host?
> Make sure you install VirtualBox Tools (or whatever they're calling it now)
> into the guest OS. ?Then you shouldn't have any display sizing or
> performance problems.

It sounds to me like he wants a VM guest optimized as a web browsing
kiosk.   It's certainly the case that the default install of most
Linux distributions targeted at desktop users is going to have lots of
stuff not required by his use case.  Unfortunately, I'm not aware of
any distribution optimized for that, but it sounds like an interesting
niche.   One thing to try might be to start with a minimal server
install of a distribution that also does desktops well and attempt to
install your browser of choice via package management.   If
dependencies are done right, you should end up with a fairly minimal
footprint compared to a full desktop install.

Unfortunately, that's not the hands off, single install that Aldo
apparently wants.  Nor do I know exactly what the "fill the entire
screen" issue might be.  If the issue is that he wants VB to start up
in full screen mode, it seems hard to find that info.  However, the
command line:

VirtualBox --startvm VMNAME --fullscreen

works for me.   "VirtualBox --help" describes several command line
options which don't seem to be documented in any of the manuals or the
on-line help that is part of the default install.  As you suggested,
installing the guest tools is always a good idea as well.

Bill Bogstad