Best Distro for Virtualization on a Netbook

cweinhofer

On my home network, all my files are stored on a central computer and accessed via SMB shares. When I am on the road, I would like to replicate that machine with a virtual equivalent. However, my laptop is a UMPC which emphasizes portability over processing power. It's currently running Win 7 HP, but with all the bells and whistles turned off.

So... I am looking for a very lightweight linux distro that would run well in a virtual environment. It needs to be able to host SMB shares and it would be nice to be able to set it up and control it via a GUI, even if it's a simple one. I don't mind installing the SMB support or GUI as long as it doesn't require a lot of command line work. Other then that, the less resource intensive the better.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Goineasy9

Any distro installed without all the bells and whistles would work. Like using Debian with Xfce or LXDE. Debian would have all necessary serices available, you'd just have to install them after the base install.
I have Fedora running on an EEEpc and there's really no bothersome slow down. I'm really not using a virtual environment with windows, well, I'm not using Windows, so I can't give you a first hand experience, but, if a distro runs on a small netbook with no problem (and Fedora is full featured) it cetainly can run in a virtual environment without problems. So, a distro like Debian without all the extras should have no problems at all.

brucecy92

Thanks for sharing