Tuesday night's LUGY meeting (03/23) at the Prescott Public Library was attended by seven people.

Gary started the meeting showing off his tower system using the overhead projector as his monitor. Gary's tower contains 14 different operating systems that he reboots into using Puppy as the base OS. Each OS is a different distro of Linux. Gary went through each OS to show the different look and feel of each one. Quite a show!

John Carter wrapped up the meeting with a discussion about Parallels, VirtualBox, and Windows. The point being that it is considered that new people to Linux will be coming from the Windows platform and they won't be comfortable just giving up Windows cold turkey, so being able to run their old Windows OS simultaneously with Linux would be the best way to make the transition.

Parallels (for a price: $79.95) seems to offer the best solution for transitioning from Windows to Linux based on its ability to allow complete access to all the hardware with little fuss. VirtualBox can do the same, but it takes some tinkering to figure out how. VMWare could also work, but wasn't discussed.

John successfully installed Win XP in a guest OS under both VirtualBox and Parallels, but was unable to install Win 7 in guest OS under either VirtualBox or Parallels. This may be something to do with the hardware (Toshiba Satellite).

If anyone has had experience installing Win 7 as a guest OS under either VirtualBox or Parallels, please post your findings in the Yahoo LUGY group.

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John Carter