Workshop: Virtualbox and Linux Mint

This will be a hands-on tutorial on how to install Oracle Virtualbox on to your notebook computer along with how to install the latest version of Mint, which is a very user-friendly and attractive Linux distribution that loves long walks on the beach and open source software.
Bring your computers! We will be installing Virtualbox, which is very good desktop virtualization software and once we have that installed, we will install Linux Mint. Linux Mint is now the fourth most popular desktop OS in the world. Here are some of the reasons for that:

• It works out of the box, with full multimedia support and is extremely easy to use.
• It's both free of cost and open source.
• It's community-driven. Users are encouraged to send feedback to the project so that their ideas can be used to improve Linux Mint.
• Based on Debian and Ubuntu, it provides about 30,000 packages and one of the best software managers.
• It's safe and reliable. Thanks to a conservative approach to software updates, a unique Update Manager and the robustness of its Linux architecture, Linux Mint requires very little maintenance (no regressions, no antivirus, no anti-spyware...etc).

What do you need in order to participate in this session?
You'll need to bring your notebook computer. It needs to have 4GB of RAM; a little less might work, but it will be more fun if you have at least 4GB. It needs 10GB of disk space free. You need to be an administrator - so that you will have the right to install software. You need to have a healthy dose of curiosity, but not much else. I promise this will be a friendly, low-stress introduction to a whole fascinating area of computing. Because of the size of some of the images, I will try to bring some thumb drives, but if you plan to attend, it might make sense for you to ping me ahead of time, so you can download before coming to the conference which will probably make everything go a bit faster.