Windows 10

Sometimes I hate to admit this but I need Windows 10 to do stuff with. Like making a multiple bootable USB key or Something like that! If you are like me and need it for a certain app that isn’t available on Linux. This solution seems to work well. It also doesn’t hurt that Microsoft is giving away Free Windows 10 to people. I didn’t have to do anything but put my email address in the system and it activated without a problem. It could just be that I have been in the beta for Windows 10 and it is associated with my account. Either way its a win for me. I decided to install Windows 10 because Windows 7 end of life was January.   I’ve never really liked Windows operating system so I tend to use it from time to time.  You could possible make it a dual boot also where Windows 10 and Linux Mint boot separately.   If that’s an option for you than it will be a whole lot faster.

Install VirtualBox on Linux

The first part of this post is how do you install Virtual Box on your Linux Mint Machine.  This might seem hard to understand but once you do it a few times you will understand it.

sudo add-apt-repository “deb [arch=amd64] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian <mydist> contrib”

Now to install the right version of Virtual box you will need to know your distro of your Linux Mint. You can easily find that out by doing the “lsb_release -cs” command and it should say Tricia, Tina, Tessa, Tara, Sylvia, Sonya, or Serena”.   You’ll put that instead of the <mydist>  So like mine it would be:

sudo add-apt-repository “deb [arch=amd64] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian tricia contrib”

It would also be a good idea to know if you have a 32 bit or 64 bit system Linux System.   You can find that out either through command line or desktop.   The command line is “arch“.  You might have to change the arch line to 32 but more than likely you are running a 64 bit system.

Now you need to Add the Keys to the repository and that command is easy.

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add –
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add –

The last step is to install Virtual Box on your Linux Mint system.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-6.1

A Good tip for those who might want to install an older version is to hit the tab button after you type the app you are wanting to install it will show you all available versions that you can install.

Installing Windows 10

You’ll need an ISO of windows 10.   I got mine from Microsoft directly.   You can download the ISO from them directly and get the latest version.  Once you have the ISO, you’ll want to run Virtualbox and set it up.   There are many Tutorials that will show you how to do that.   This one was just install Virtualbox on Linux MInt.