Mandriva One running on VirtualBox

Some of you may remember my account of my disastrous first try with running Ubuntu using Microsoft Virtual PC, in which pretty much nothing worked. I then tried out some virtual machines on VMware player — both Ubuntu and Fedora. Admittedly, I was kind of lazy with those and didn’t play around with either too much. So, lest you think I don’t listen to the advice I get from the blogs, I decided to try Mandriva on VirtualBox. I just downloaded both today, so I haven’t really had time to do much yet. Still, I was momentarily confused by how smoothly everything went and how quickly everything installed. I didn’t have to do anything, or even deal with any confusing configuration issues, which I found to be so confounding, that I thought I must have left out some step and done something wrong already!

I don’t know that I’ve really got a good handle on how the whole virtualization thing works either, just to clarify my ignorance. I never know exactly what I can do and what I can’t on a virtual machine, and I have the overpowering paranoia that I’m going to somehow hose my entire workstation and have to go crawling to tech support to save my rear end. Perish the thought.

Well, I’m actually going to try to learn something about both Mandriva and virtual machines in the next few weeks as I have time. If you have suggestions for fun little exercises I should try to work on or a good way to learn about certain features, please let me know. This is your chance to school a Linux newbie, as annoying as that might be.