This weekend I discovered that there is a Linux distribution, Debian Jessie, that now has the Raspberry Pi Desktop, download from here.

So I installed it as a virtual machine on my Windows 10 PC using VMWare Professsional Pro 14. The only difficulty was getting VMWare Tools working to allow automatic screen resizing and file sharing. Found some good info on the VMWare communities site (search for vmware tools debian jessie). From this thread there is a great perl script to help install VMWare Tools. The only modification I made was to delete –default from the line that runs the VMWare installer, without which the script will suggest an alternative option and abandon the installation.

I made a YouTube video of my virtual machine installation and VMWare tools configuration:

 

The script for VMWare tools:

#!/bin/bash 
 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get upgrade 
echo "Do go and mount your cdrom from the VMware menu" 
echo "press any key to continue" 
read -n 1 -s 
mount /dev/cdrom 
cd /media/cdrom0 
cp VMwareTools-*.tar.gz /tmp 
cd /tmp 
tar xvzf VMwareTools-*.tar.gz 
cd vmware-tools-distrib/ 
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends libglib2.0-0 
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends build-essential 
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends gcc-4.3 linux-headers-`uname -r` 
sudo ./vmware-install.pl 
 
sudo /etc/init.d/networking stop 
sudo rmmod pcnet32 
sudo rmmod vmxnet 
sudo modprobe vmxnet 
sudo /etc/init.d/networking start