VirtualBox: With the developments in operating systems and all this fuss about privacy violations, there are many who are thinking of alternatives to deal with all this. One solution is to not upgrade to Windows 10 or the next Mac OS X. But, for how long? Another solution is to try open source alternatives, such as a Linux distribution (there are plenty), but will I be able to do everything like I did on Windows? The answer is both yes and no. My answer is, “enjoy looking!”
What should one pay attention to?
The idea of using a new operating system may seem exciting, but the transition is not always as easy as it seems! Fortunately, there are Linux distributions that have a graphical interface that is a bit “reminiscent” of Windows, so beginners will not find it difficult. There is also great online support (there are many forums in Greek as well), so anyone can find an immediate solution to any problem they encounter.
What is VirtualBox?
VirtualBox, as the name suggests, is a virtual platform through which we can run any operating system, without having to partition the disk, select boot, etc. It is developed by Oracle and you can find it here for free. (Prerequisite for the guide that follows).
Why VirtualBox?
Because one can run it alongside Windows (on a second screen for example, or as if opening a program within Windows). Also, one can simply delete it with 2 clicks without touching their hard drive and without having to format the disk. My opinion is also that, the transition should not be done radically, what I mean is, with the mess that has been made in recent years with personal data, the first thing someone says is “fu*k windows, I'm throwing it off my pc”. Oh no! And if you find them dark in the alternative? Format again and waste of time?
So it's better to run them through Windows for as long as you want. And if you see how they work for you and you can do without our favorite "windows", switch to a clean Linux installation.
Which Linux distribution will we use and why?
We will use Ubuntu.
- Because it has a friendly environment for smooth transition from Windows users.
- The 15.04 release is supported for 9 months, which means that we won't be left out in the cold when it comes to security updates, development, and applications. And with the subsequent LTS release, we will have long-term free support.
- There is great support in Greek forums.
Starting!
As I said above, installing VirtualBox is a prerequisite, so I'm starting with the assumption that it is already installed on our computer.
The next step is to download the image file of the Ubuntu 15.04 distribution.
64bit version [iso]
32bit version [iso]
32bit version [torrent]
64bit version [torrent]
After downloading the virtual file (size 1.1GB) and saving it somewhere on our computer, we continue by opening VirtualBox and clicking on “New” in the top left.
Then, after clicking “New”, the following will appear.
We click “Next” on all the other tabs until the one below appears.
Here we choose how much RAM we will allow the Virtual Machine to allocate for Ubuntu. If you download the 32bit version, do not put more than 4GB. It will not recognize it. If you download the 64bit version, you can put up to the red mark.
We continue to click “Next” until the following image appears.
Here we need to define how much disk space we are allocating to the VM. Although the recommended amount in Ubuntu is 8GB, I recommend that you give it at least 15GB.
When we're done with this, the VM home page will look like this.
On the left is the "start" to start the operating system and on the right the features we defined, hard drive space, RAM, etc.
To configure a few more parameters, go to the top left to “Settings”, next to the “New” we used before and select it. Select the following options as shown in the images.
In this step we select the .iso that the VM will read to install the operating system. In our case, the Ubuntu .iso that we have saved on our computer.
When all the steps are done correctly and we click “OK”, we go to the main page of the VM, double-click on Ubuntu and the operating system begins the virtual installation.
I won't describe the installation because it's a standard procedure. Just follow the instructions that appear carefully!
When everything is finished, you will have the following result.
We will be able to run the new operating system we installed as a simple program within Windows (no matter which version we use, the process is the same).
Initially, it does not appear in full screen, to do this we will have to install specific drivers.
Once installed and rebooted, the operating system will open in full screen. We can minimize it using the options at the bottom (they appear when we hover the mouse over it).
This concludes the guide to installing Ubuntu on a VM. Below we will see how to make a folder or an entire hard drive shared between the two operating systems.
Folder/drive sharing.
To share a disk, for example, we need to make the following choices. Again through the “Settings” option.
In my example, I selected the entire D:\ drive to share with Ubuntu. The name of the drive is D_DRIVE.
After selecting this from the VM settings in Windows, we run Ubuntu and open the terminal. What we need to do now is to “mount”, that is, make our operating system recognize the shared disk. This will be done very simply through the terminal, by issuing the following commands:
sudo mkdir /media/"DISK_OR_FOLDER_NAME"/
sudo mount -t vboxsf "DISK_OR_FOLDER_NAME" /media/"DISK_OR_FOLDER_NAME"/
Once the commands are executed, you can browse to the “media” location and view the contents of the folder or drive you shared.
As you can see in the image below, we can see the contents of the disk in both operating systems!
For any questions, you can ask by commenting below the Facebook post.
