As mentioned below, as I go off MacOS, I have been investing more (precious) time getting a Centos 7.0 desktop fully functional. Mail is up and running in the shape of Thunderbird, which I preferred over Evolution. Neither seem particularly customisable (particularly fonts) but Thunderbird seems to have the edge.

My next major requirement is virtualisation. I didn’t have any luck with VMware Player as a first attempt. It loaded some kernel modules and I pointed at my existing vmx files but the VMs didn’t boot and now the player just crashed with a couple of error lines in the USBArb log.

In any case, I wanted to use KVM on Linux and have reached the milestone of building a Centos 7 guest VM using VMM and qemu-kvm (after overcoming the obligatory hurdles, luckily relatively minor). I don’t have much faith in VMware and KVM working together although there’s no reason why they shouldn’t (VMware player is a type 2 hypervisor, or is it?) Things are complicated enough as it is without trying to run two hypervisors on the same machine!

Next experiment is to get my Windows desktops currently running under VMware workstation on Ubuntu into QEMU/KVM.