Installation Platform: Dell Inspiron 17R laptop, 3rd-gen Intel i7-3612QM @ 2.1 Ghz, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB Crucial SSD with Windows 7 Professional as the host.
I decided I’d install a trial version of VMWare Workstation 11. It’s a 30-day trial, and I’m sure I’ll buy it before the trial period is up simply because it’s a great product.
In order to install a 64-bit guest OS on VMWare Workstation, the host machine itself has to be running a 64-bit processor that supports virtualization and has that support enabled. When initially installing VMWare Workstation, it does not ask you to boot afterwards. But if you attempt to create a 64-bit guest OS VM, it won’t let you. I ended up rebooting my machine, and then I was able to to create a 64-bit guest OS (I specified that Ubuntu 64-bit was going to be installed). I specified a guest host with 2 GB of RAM and usage of 1 CPU core, although I’m likely to up those figures later on.
I then put in the Linux Mint 17.1 CD, booted up the VM into the LiveCD of Linux Mint, and started the installation. Installation of Mint took about 22 minutes. Next step was updating the Update Manager and then updating existing software for which the Update Manager indicated there were updates available. This part of the process is quick on my machine, but for the fact that the Mint update server that I was connect to was slow as molasses during the updates. Incidentally, there were 350 MB worth of updates. The download / installation of the updates took 13 minutes.
So in total, it took me about 40 minutes to set up the VM, install and update Linux Mint.
Now on to installing the things I’m interested in, such as git, pybombs, gnuradio, gqrx, and gr-OP25.
UPDATE 01-01-2015: Happy New Year! I gave up on using VMWare Workstation for the job. Technically, there was no issue. But VMWare Workstation takes over your whole machine, with a gazillion resource-hogging services running even when you don’t have VMW open. I don’t like that. I run a fast machine with SSD drives because I like the system to be responsive. VMWare Workstation is totally counterproductive to that. After having uninstalled the whole VMWare Workstation suite of shit, it’s onward and upward to VirtualBox + Linux Mint 17 64-bit.