How to install and configure virtualbox in linux: debian, ubuntu, linux mint ...

Today we bring you an interesting tutorial in which we will show you how to install VirtualBox in our Linux distribution, something very useful if we want or need to use another operating system such as Windows, but we do not want to do a real installation on the hard drive of our computer.

Index of contents

We recommend reading the following tutorials:

• How to install ubuntu 16.04 in VirtualBox. How to install Windows 10 in VirtualBox. How to convert IMG files to VirtualBox VDI format.

What is VirtualBox?

VirtualBox is an advanced and complete free software for the virtualization of operating systems. This program allows us to create a virtual computer inside our PC so that we can test other operating systems as if it were just another application within Windows. With this we have the total security that we cannot cause any harm to our computer.

How to install VirtualBox on Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives

Installing VirtualBox on Debian, Ubuntu and derived systems is very simple, we just have to open a terminal and type the following command:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-qt

Once typed we can only let the system work and we can find VirtualBox in the application menu of our distribution.

How to create a virtual machine

Once the program is installed, the next step is to create the virtual machine where we will then install the "guest" operating system. The virtual machine is still a file that will be saved on our PC and will contain everything necessary for the installation of the "guest" system.

First of all we must create a virtual machine for it we open the application and click on " new".

A window will appear asking us to give a name to the virtual machine and select the type of operating system that we are going to install, in this case we are going to install Ubuntu 32 bits.

The next step is to assign the RAM to the virtual machine, 2048 MB is the recommended minimum to guarantee fluidity, although it will depend on the resources of your PC.

Once the RAM is established, we have to create a virtual hard disk for the new machine, select " Create a virtual hard disk now " and click "Create" and select the option VDI (VirtualBOX Disk Image) on the next screen and with size "Reserved Dynamic". The latter will make the system allocate disk space to the virtual machine depending on its need, in this way we will not waste space on our precious hard disk.

With this we have already created the virtual machine, the program offers us more options but at this point we already have everything necessary to make our virtual operating system work. To start the virtual machine we just have to click on "start". When we start the machine it will ask us to indicate the path of the ISO image of the operating system that we want to install.

If we want to further customize our virtual machine, we will have to enter the "configure" section of the VirtualBox main screen, the main option that our readers will need to modify is the "storage" option.

In this section we can configure all the disks of our virtual machine: the hard disk, the optical drive (CD-ROM) and the floppy drive. The main element that is usually modified is the CD-ROM to load different discs or ISO images in the virtual machine.

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To do this, click on the CD icon in the storage tree and select the " Add optical drive " option. Then a window will open from which we can add the ISO images that we want.

With this we will simulate the introduction of a real CD-ROM in the virtual machine, the most common thing will be to select the image of the operating system that we want to install in the virtual machine. In this way we can also test the Linux Live-CDs in a very comfortable way while we have our real operating system working.