Re: My process of choosing VM software, I started with:
"Virtualization Benchmark Showdown – Parallels 10 vs. Fusion 7 vs. VirtualBox"
"Parallels Desktop 10 offers better performance in most areas compared to VMware Fusion 7. While the gap is narrow in some categories, Parallels 10 simply outmatches Fusion 7 in both raw processing power and graphics performance."
"But both Parallels and Fusion faced surprisingly competent competition from VirtualBox. While a distant third in most benchmarks, VirtualBox easily handled most of our non-GPU tasks without a hitch. You won’t want to use a VirtualBox VM for gaming or heavy workloads, and disk performance could be better, but if you just need to run some moderately demanding Windows software on your Mac,...there’s absolutely no need to spend upwards of $80 on commercial virtualization software. In addition, VirtualBox is cross-platform, meaning that you can move your VMs between OS X, Windows, and Linux host operating systems with ease (although it should be said that this is also true of VMware and its broader virtualization ecosystem)."
Going with VB, which I installed.
Downloaded linuxmint-17.1-mate-64bit.iso. Created a new virtual machine with Ubuntu 64-bit setting. 512MB RAM. Virtual VDI 8GB HDD, dynamically allocated up to 16GB.
Note: Tried to do it with an actual disk, first. Being on a 2014 MacBook Pro I had to use an external, USB CDROM with the Mint environmant. OS X complained about mounting the disk, but I ignored that problem and the virtual image saw it just fine (I just clicked "Start" to install). Extremely slow (as expected), though, so I used the ISO disk image mounted virtually instead (via Devices in menu).