Ever wanted to test something on another platform than the current one you’re on?
Needed to take screenshots of a windows environment while having a *nix-only network?
Then you might consider running the extra OS as a guest in a virtual machine.
There are lots of different ways to do this on Ubuntu.
You might want to use VMware, Xen, KVM, Iguest, rhyp, UML, qemu, OpenVZ, … catch my drift? 😉Before making a rash decision, you should consider each of them carefully.
Then start by asking yourself the question “What do I need?”.
This is the single most important question when you want to install some software, as lots of them have cool features, you only use the first week.
I had quite some people suggesting VMware server, as it is free and gets the job done like it should plus it has cool features.
But nevertheless I chose Sun’s VirtualBox because:
- it’s free
- it’s Foss
- it’s in the repository’s
- it shows the world that a big company can easily produce Foss and gain on it.
- it does whatever I need it to do.
To install VirtaulBox fire up a terminal and hit:
sudo apt-get install virtualbox
This will give you some output that might look like this (will differ depending the packages already on your system):
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Note, selecting virtualbox-ose instead of virtualbox
The following extra packages will be installed:
libaudio2 libqt4-dbus libqt4-designer libqt4-network libqt4-qt3support libqt4-script libqt4-sql libqt4-sql-mysql libqt4-xml libqtcore4 libqtgui4 qt4-qtconfig virtualbox-ose virtualbox-ose-source
Suggested packages:
nas libqt4-dev bridge-utils
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libaudio2 libqt4-dbus libqt4-designer libqt4-network libqt4-qt3support libqt4-script libqt4-sql libqt4-sql-mysql libqt4-xml libqtcore4 libqtgui4 qt4-qtconfig virtualbox-ose virtualbox-ose-source
0 upgraded, 14 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 9413kB/18.7MB of archives.
After this operation, 68.0MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Answer the question with “Y” and apt wil work it’s magic!
Note that the last lines in your terminal will look like:
Adding modules to DKMS build system
Doing initial module builds
Installing initial modules
Done.
* Stopping VirtualBox kernel module… [ OK ]
* Starting VirtualBox kernel module… [ OK ]Processing triggers for libc6 …
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
There is no real need to restart you computer or start the service, as it is done for you.
So now you’ve mastered installing a visualization app. in no-time 🙂
