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Ray: You can make a live cd copy of linux mint and if you set your laptop up to boot from cd/dvd, you can play all you want without having to install the os. I’m not familiar with using vm, but I suspect you might need to have a boot loader outside the vm, so when you start your computer you are given a choice. But I am speaking from a position of extreme ignorance here. Have you tried the Ubuntu forums. People seem pretty helpful there.

Ted

I’ve been dual booting Linux Mint, in a couple of progressive distros, for the last year and a half. Currently I am using v10. I just purchased a Shuttle XPC box last month without an OS so I went through the full dual boot install experience with both Mint and XP. The only glitch was getting sound to work on the linux side. Found some good stuff on one of the forums and fixed it right up. I really enjoy using linux and if it weren’t for my ipod and nook, I would abandon XP altogether. In my opinion you can get as geeky with linux as you want. If you stick with a distro like mint its pretty much fire and forget for the majority of users. The only thing I had/have trouble getting my head around is the file system difference. Working on it!

Ted

I’ve enjoyed reading this thread and wanted to share my experience with Linux Mint. Last summer (09) my computer was aging and despite my best efforts at keeping it clean and fast, it seemed time for a major hardware upgrade. My computer is home grown (self assembled) with a generic via chipset motherboard, AMD 64 3000+ processor, 2 gb of memory and a ATI Radeon 256MB video card. I had heard that linux was a cleaner, faster os, so I downloaded a copy of Linux Mint Gloria. I booted it from the cd and played a bit, and decided pretty quickly to install it and set up a dual boot with XP. The experience has been totally positive. The distro I got included the software to partition my hard drives within the gui, so I didn’t have to learn or figure out the unix language. There was an initial video card glitch when I tried to tweak my video card settings within linux, but when I backed off of that, the problem went away. The generic drivers saw my wireless mouse and keyboard as well as the printer/scanner right away. I have a wireless router, but I am directly connected to it so that wasn’t an issue. But my son is able to download netflix movies to my PC and port them over the wireless network to his xbox without any problems, so that must have worked without my involvement.

But the difference in speed was incredible. It was like buying a new computer.

I do 98% of my computing using Linux Mint, I am using Helena now. Firefox is my browser, Thunderbird my email client, and Open Office for my documents, etc. I even use KMymoney for my financial stuff. The only reason I maintain an XP partition is because of Itunes. I haven’t yet found a good replacement with Linux. If we didn’t all have iPods at my house, then there are plenty of choices for music software.

Linux is different, no question about it. And it does require a little more user involvement than a Windows OS. But I’ve been really happy with it. But it would be much cheaper to buy new MP4 players for everyone in my house than it would be to upgrade my computer and purchase Win7.

The earlier comments about the AV and Firewall software are on point. Linux doesn’t yet have the market share to make its population attractive to the malware/virus. Once it does, then the Linux distros will be in the same boat as the mainstream operating systems.

But for now, not having to have that stuff running on my computer is great. Another plus, you don’t get nagged for updates to the software you are running, just a little icon in your system bar that changes if one is available. And I have yet had to reboot after updating my system. Never.

I’m happy with it.

Ted