VirtualBox Setup
The Situation
My setups with ARM weren't doing so great, so I wanted to try using Oracle's VirtualBox.
Specifically, I was running into issues setting up desktop environments.
Certain OS's I wanted to play with didn't offer images for ARM architecture.
In the future, I might try setting up dual booting, possibly with Arch.
Installation and setup
The installation was relatively straightforward.
I got the .deb file from
Oracle's page.
I then ran
sudo dpkg -i <blah>
where <blah> represents the name of the uncompressed file.
I ran into a small error, where one package wasn't there, libqt5openg15.
I installed it, then ran
sudo apt --fix-broken install
That fixed the issue.
You'll also need to go get .iso
image of the OS you want. In my case, I went with
Debian 10.5.0 with the XFCE desktop environment for 64-bit systems
. Since I was installing Debian, I basically followed
an excellent tutorial by linuxhint
. The version of VirtualBox is a bit different, but the steps to follow
are largely the same.
My Thoughts
I think I'll start with what I liked.
Pros
- It’s ridiculously easy to set up
- XFCE seems a tad lighter than GNOME
Cons
- Within the computer, though, it's a nightmare to get basic customization done.
For example,
getting a terminal to open up and customizing the default applications took a bit
more effort than I would have liked.
- Working with a virtual box is really, really slow
Overall, my biggest issues were the speed and how nonintuitive customization was.
I think I'd prefer something that didn't try to guess what I want.