Once upon a time, the Book of Faces was hacked. Afterwards, Burger King’s Twitter account was broken into. Pretty soon, several computers at Apple HQ were attacked by a Java exploit. In the end, it turned out that everything pointed to an iPhone SDK message board (that didn’t know it was rigged with malware).
And then I thought…what if I needed to look at a site that I wasn’t sure was booby-trapped? Then I thought, ‘oho! I could set up a virtual machine that I can view the site on. If the site does turn out to be infested and ruins the VM, I can just close it and restore it to the snapshot pre-infestation.’
I ended up going with Linux for a few reasons…
- MBP (which has a bazillion times more space than my desktop, hilariously enough) does not have a CD/DVD drive for me to install Windows on via disc. (It somehow became busted. So I took it out. It runs much quieter now without the DVD drive.)
- Linux is free, and can be downloaded from the internet and does not need to be installed via disc.
- OS X Lion can be installed without a disc, but I thought about diversifying my OSs. I have Windows, Mac OS X and now Linux. 😀 (And there are other operating systems like FreeBSD, Solaris and OS/2, but I think Linux is good enough.)
I went with Mint, since I read a bit online on how it’s easy to use like Ubuntu, but fixes the usability problems Ubuntu had. And also… 😳 I kinda like the name. Although I think next time I need to reinstall Mint, I’ll use the Xfce environment (the toolbar at the bottom looks prettier and sleeker, I like the icons better and I guess it’s supposed to be friendly for computers low on resources, which would be better for a VM). Also 😳 the lettering on the desktop wallpaper is kinda nice too. Shiny with beveled edges…<3