By reading the list of the virtual machines in VirtualBox Manager, VBoxLaunch creates links to each available virtual machine in the jumplist. In addition, the jumplist can also be accessed from the Taskbar if a shortcut is created there.

Use the following link to download VBoxLaunch.

The .zip file will need to be extracted. Copy the application and paste the VBoxLaunch.exe in the location C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox. Paste the .exe file to the directory.

Right-click this shortcut and choose Create Shortcut. The shortcut can be placed in any location and it will serve its purpose. It is possible that you may not have the permissions necessary create files in the VirtualBox directory. In this case, you will only have the option to create the shortcut on the Desktop. Click Yes for this option. It is easiest to create the shortcut on the Desktop rather than a file location to which you will have to navigate. Once you have created the shortcut, right-click the shortcut and Pin to Start Menu. If you would rather access your virtual machines from the taskbar, it is just as easy. Right-click the shortcut and Pin to Taskbar. It will work the same either way.

To create the jumplist links, start VBoxLaunch from the Start menu or Taskbar once. This will open the VirtualBox Manager, displaying the virtual machines. Next, close the VirtualBox Manager and the jumplist will be set.
Navigate to the Start menu and click the VBoxLaunch shortcut and the jumplist with your virtual machines will open under “Recent Virtual Machines”.

Click on the virtual machine that you want to open and VirtualBox will start the machine. In this demonstration, Windows 8 Developer was selected and it opened immediately without having to use the VirtualBox Manager.

You basically get to skip a step and make the virtual machine access more of a Windows 7 experience.
You will notice that there is a “Manage virtual machines” item under Tasks in the jumplist. By clicking this, you can open the VirtualBox Manager and remove any existing shortcuts to the Virtual Box Manger, if desired.

Though it is a simple tool, it is a convenient tool and useful to users who want to have virtual machine shortcuts in the start menu. You will still need to open VirtualBox directly to make alterations to settings.

This will require Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, which is extant on Windows 7. If it is not already installed, it can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.

Download and install the latest version of LiLi from the link that follows.

Follow all of the steps in the installer and click Finish at the end. Check the box to “Run LinuxLive USB Creator”. The application will launch and you can get started if you already have the LinuxLive ISO downloaded or on CD/DVD.

If you do not have a Linux ISO downloaded or on CD/DVD, you will need to download the ISO first. There is no need to burn it to a CD or DVD unless you want a hard copy. You can download it to your hard drive and LiLi can access it from there. Not all versions of Linux are compatible with LinuxLive USB Creator. Ubuntu, Knoppix, and LinuxMint are good LinuxLive options. One that works very well with this method is Fedora. A link to download the Fedora ISO is included here. Unlike many of the Linux ISO downloads, this one does not take long to download and is definitely compatible with LiLi. (check out Distrowatch’s list of major distributions for other downloads)

At the LiLi interface, you will find that it is broken down into 5 steps. Just follow the steps in the order listed to install Linux to your USB drive. The first step is to choose the USB drive or other portable USB device for installation.

If the volume is formatted in NTFS, you will later need to format it in FAT32. We will get to that, but you may as well format your USB in FAT32 before starting. In step 2 you will choose whether to use an existing ISO/IMG/Zip file, CD, or tow download an ISO from supported distributors.

LiLi will then check the ISO to ensure that it is a good file and is compatible.

In step 3, you set the amount of space for drive persistence. This is how you will be able to save files and installed programs between reboots. This does take up drive space, but it is well worth it to have the persistence. The larger the capacity of the USB drive, the better if you will be adding many programs and files.

In step 4, enable Launching LinuxLive in Windows and this will download portable VirtualBox to the USB. If the USB drive is already formatted in FAT32, you can leave that box unchecked. If it is formatted in NTFS, check the box to format in FAT32. Click the lightning bolt image in step 5 and the drive will be created. When it is complete, you will see the sign of success:

To use your new LinuxLive key, open Windows Explorer and open the USB drive, double-click VirtualBox\Virtualize_this_key.exe and portable VirtualBox will be launched and your installed version of Linux will open.

I do use VirtualBox and was thrilled to come across phpVirtualBox. This tool is an AJAX implementation of the familiar VirtualBox user interface, so the minute you log in you will be instantly at home. Let’s take a look at how this tool is installed and used.

First things first

You need to make sure you have the latest VirtualBox installed as well as the Extension Pack. You can run phpVirtualBox with the 3.x release of VirtualBox, but there are a lot more features available in the 4.x release. You can download both from the VirtualBox download page. You will also need to have the PHP Soap extension. This can be installed by searching for the package php-soap in your Add/Remove Software tool. Once you have that installed, you are then ready to install and configure the phpVirtualBox application.

You will also have to have a working Apache server on the target machine. If you do not have that, you can go ahead and do a full LAMP install (which will cover a lot of your basics).

Installing phpVirtualBox

First download the compressed installation file from the download page. Make sure you download the release that is correct for the version of VirtualBox you have installed. What you need to do is to move that file into your web server’s document root and then unpack it. When you unpack the file you will have a newly created directory /var/www/phpvirtualbox-XXX Where XXX is the release number. I highly recommend you rename that directory to just /var/www/phpvirtualbox.

After you have the file unpacked, you need to do a minor configuration. This minor configuration is in the /var/www/phpvirtualbox/config.php. NOTE: Depending upon your distribution, your document root will differ.

You really only need configure the following options:

• var $username
• var $password

Make sure the username and password are for the user that will actually run the virtualbox application (so this won’t be a root user).

You are now ready to fire up daemon. To run this simply issue the command vboxwebsrv. This will run the daemon that will allow you to log into your phpvitualbox machine. NOTE: If you are using VirtualBox 4.x you can start the daemon with the command /etc/init.d/vbweb-service. There is one catch with that, you still want to run the web service as the user that will run VirtualBox.

Log in

Open up a browser and point it to http://ADDRESS_TO_SERVER/phpvirtualbox. When you do this you will see the VirtualBox interface embedded into your web browser. You can then use VirtualBox from within that web browser as if it were on the local machine!

Gotcha

If you are running VirtualBox 3.x you will need to take one other step (prior to starting up the daemon). Open up your terminal window and issue the command:

VBoxManage setproperty websrvauthlibrary null

Once that command has run, you can then start up the daemon and use VirtualBox through your webbrowser.

The official changelog lists all the changes, among them a major rework of the graphical user interface, improvements to OVF (Open Virtualization Format) support, new resource control options to limit a virtual machine’s cpu time and IO bandwidth, storage support for asynchronous I/O iSCSI, VMDK, VHD and Parallels images, support for resiting VFI and VHD images, new virtual hardware and support for more than 1.5/2 GB of RAM on 32-bit hosts.

The developers have also reorganized the application into a base package and extension packs.

Starting with version 4.0, VirtualBox is split into several components.

The base package consists of all open-source components and is licensed under the GNU General Public License V2.

Additional extension packs can be downloaded which extend the functionality of the VirtualBox base package. Currently, Oracle provides the one extension pack, which can be found at http://www.virtualbox.org and provides the following added functionality:

The virtual USB 2.0 (EHCI) device; see the section called “USB settings”.

VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support; see the section called “Remote display (VRDP support)”.

Intel PXE boot ROM with support for the E1000 network card.

VirtualBox extension packages have a .vbox-extpack file name extension. To install an extension, simply double-click on the package file, and the VirtualBox Manager will guide you through the required steps.

The official user manual has already been updated to reflect the changes and feature additions in VirtualBox 4.0. New users should especially take a closer look at the first steps chapter.

Existing users and interested new users find the download of VirtualBox 4.0 at the official website. The download page offers VirtualBox versions for all platforms, the extension packs, developer kits, the user manual in pdf format and sources. (via)

There are a few methods of running virtual machines on a Linux host: VirtualBox, VMWare, KVM, and QEMU are four of the most popular. Each method has it’s pros and cons. One of the cons of trying to use straight-up QEMU is that you’re going to be dealing with a command line method of creating and running a virtual machine. That’s not a bad option if you don’t mind a lot of typing at the command line. If you want to go the QEMU route, but don’t want to have to have depend upon the command line to do so, you can opt to use a GUI tool QTEMU. This tool is an easy to use graphical front end for the QEMU virtual machine tool. In this tutorial you are going to learn how to create a virtual machine using QTEMU. But why use QTEMU? QTEMU will work as a front end for either QEMU or KVM. So if you have the hardware to support KVM you can go that route and have a much more efficient virtual machine.

Installation

For the purposes of this article, I am installing and using QTEMU on a Debian system, so the installation will be done via Synaptic. To be safe you will want to search for (and select for installation) the following applications:

• virtinst
• virt-manager
• kvm
• python-libvirt
• libvirt-bin
• qemu
• qtemu
• virt-viewer
• bridge-utils

The above list will install more than you might need, but there are tools that can be taken advantage of later on. After you have selected all of these applications for installation, click Apply to install.

When all of the installation is done you will be ready to run QTEMU for the first time. If using KDE 4.x, you will find QTEMU in the System Tools sub-menu labeled Virtual Machine Manager. Fire that up and get ready to create your first virtual machine.

Creating a machine

Figure 1

From the main window (see Figure 1) you will want to click the “Create a new virtual machine…” button. You might think this would start up a wizard, but it doesn’t – sort of. Instead, when you create a new virtual machine, a single window opens up asking a couple of simple questions. The first question is what type of operating system you want to install. From the drop down you can select from Linux, Windows, ReactOS, or Other. For our example we will create a Linux virtual machine. Once you select that click the Next button to open up a new window asking for a name and a location for the new machine. The location is just the path that will store the new machine file. Fill that information out and click Next. The final window requires you to specify the size of the disk image. Enter the size for the image and click Finish. Now the real work begins.

Figure 2

As you can see, in Figure 2,  I have created an image for an OpenSuSE virtual machine. As of this point all that is done is the virtual machine file has been created. What has to happen now is to click on each of the following buttons and configure the respective sections as needed for the virtual machine.

• Memory: How much RAM to dedicate to the virtual machine.
• Hard Disk: This has already been created. You do not need to do anything here.
• CD ROM: Here you will specify where the virtual machine will find the image for installation. You can use either a CD/DVD or an ISO image file.
• Floppy Disk: Most likely not used.
• Network: Here you will want to enable networking (by checking the “Enable network” check box).
• Sound: If you need sound enabled, do so here.
• Other: Here you can enable seamless mouse, configure the number of virtual CPUs, enable local time, and add addition QEMU options.

Once you have all of that configured you just need to click the Start button to start up your virtual machine. It’s that simple.

Final thoughts

You now have yet another tool in your toolbox to enable virtual machines. QTEMU makes easy the task of creating virtual machines using QEMU or KVM. Give this a try and see if you prefer it over either Virtualbox or VMWare.

One of the really cool aspects of VirtualBox is that it can also work as a virtual machine server. With that you can run an instance of a virtual machine from a remote location. Of course you have to have the piece of software to connect to VirtualBox. On Linux one very handy tool for that is rdesktop. In this article I am going to show you how to connect to a VirtualBox machine using rdesktop.

So far I have covered VirtualDesk fairly extensively so far. The VirtualBox “cannon” includes:

Installing and configuraing VirtualBox for virtual OSes.

Installing Windows XP as a virtual machine in VirtualBox.

Install Guest Additions for a better VirtualBox experience.

A new way of thinking, thanks for virtual machines.

Install VirtualBox Guest Additions in Windows 7.

Install VirtualBox with USB support.

Before you read this particular article, you might want to go through the above series so you have a better understanding of VirtualBox.

Configuring your virtual machine

Before you even try to connect to a virtual machine (with any software) you first have to set up your virtual machine so that it will allow connections to be made. VirtualBox uses the VRDP protocol for remote connections. What you need to do is go into the settings of the virtual machine and enable this. NOTE: You have to do this on a VM by VM basis. Just because you enable VRDP on one virtual machine does not mean it will be enabled on all VMs.

Let’s work with a Windows 7 virtual machine. Windows 7 (or Vista) is a special instance because you have to actually enable remote connections within the operating system as well as within VirtualBox. With Windows XP or most instances of Linux, you will not have to do anything beyond enabling VRDP in VirtualBox.

To enable VRDP open up VirtualBox and click on the virtual machine you want to connect to. Now click the Settings button. NOTE: If the settings button is grayed out you need to start that virtual machine and then power it off. If you just save the state of the virtual machine you can not change the settings.

Figure 1

Once inside the settings window click on the Remote Desktop “tab” (see Figure 1).

In this section you will need to click the checkbox for “Enable VRDP Server”. Once that is checked you can configure the options to suit your needs (the defaults work fine for Windows 7) and then click OK when you are finished.

Now it’s time to boot up your Windows 7 virtual machine. When Windows 7 is up and running click on the Start menu and enter “Remote” (no quotes) in the Search area. You will see a few entries in the results. Of those entries click  “Allow remote access to your computer”.  When this new window opens (see Figure 2) you need to check “Allow Remote Assistance connections to this computer” and then check the middle option under the Remote Desktop section.

After you have taken care of this, click OK and you are ready to connect. Time to go over to your remote Linux machine.

Installing and using rdesktop

Installing rdesktop is simple:

1. Open up a terminal window (you’ll need one open anyway).
2. Enter the command sudo apt-get install rdesktop.
3. Enter your sudo command.
4. What rdesktop install.

After rdesktop is installed, you’re ready. To connect to the remote virtual machine you will enter a command like this:

rdesktop -u USER -p PASSWORD -g RESOLUTION -a COLORDEPTH ADDRESS

Where:

• USER is the username of the HOST.
• PASSWORD is the password for the user on the HOST.
• RESOLUTION is the resolution you want to use.
• COLORDEPTH is the amount of colors use (16 or 24).
• ADDRESS is the location of the server housing the virtual machine (including the port).

So the command I use to connect is:

rdesktop -u jlwallen -p password -g 1224x1024 -a 16 192.168.1.100:3389

You will know right away if your connection worked because the virtual machine will open in a new window.

And that’s all it takes. You can use this virtual machine as if it were on your local machine.

Final thoughts

VirtualBox continues to show itself to be one of the most flexible, useful tools available. By employing a simple tool like rdesktop, you can now connect to a centralized virtual machine server with ease.

Installing and configuring VirtualBox for virtual OSes.

Installing Windows XP as a virtual machine in VirtualBox.

Install Guest Additions for a better VirtualBox experience.

A new way of thinking thanks to virtual machines.

Although the Guest Additions tool has been covered already, if you’ve tried using Windows 7 in VirtualBox you will have most likely encountered some issues. The main issue is that Guest Additions isn’t supported. That doesn’t mean it can not be installed. It can, you just have to trick Windows 7 in order to do so. In this article I will show you just how to do so.

The basic installation

The first thing you need to do is get Windows 7 installed as a virtual machine. You can follow the directions for installing Windows XP. The only difference will be selecting the version of Windows you will be installing. Even though Windows 7 is not yet officially supported, there is an entry for the latest Microsoft OS in the dropdown.

After Windows 7 is installed you might notice (depending upon your hardware) that you can not see the task bar. This is because, without the Guest Additions, VirtualBox can not handle the proper resolution for Windows 7. So, it’s obvious you will need this tool.

The trick

The trick for installing Guest Additions in Window 7 is to trick it into thinking it’s being installed in Vista. While Vista is running click on the Devices menu and select Install Guest Additions. You will go through the same steps as you would for installing the Guest Additions on Windows XP at this point. The difference is the actual installer won’t start up. This is where it gets a bit tricky.

The process of installing the Guest Additions will have downloaded a mountable file on your system. If you click on the Windows 7 Start Menu and then click on Computer you will see that file listed along with Local Disk and Floppy Drive (even if you don’t have a floppy drive). Right click the VirtualBox Guest Additions entry (it will probably be labeled as “D”) and select Open.

In the resulting window you will see a number of files. Among these files you will see listed entries for both x86 and 64bit. These files are called:

VBoxWindowsAdditions-amd64

VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86

Figure 1

Which file you use will depend upon what hardware you are using. Right click the one you want to use and select Troubleshoot Compatibility (see Figure 1). This will walk you through a Wizard that will attempt to solve the problem. Most likely it won’t, so you will have to do so manually. When the wizard has finished you will have two options: Try Recommended Settings and Troubleshoot Program. Select Troubleshoot Program and then, in the new window, select the first entry which is

Figure 2

“The program worked in earlier versions of Windows but won’t install or run now.” After you select this option click the Next button and then select Vista from the list (see Figure 2). Once you have selected that option click Next and then, in the resulting window, click the “Start the Program” button. This will actually start the process of installing the Guest Additions for Windows 7. You can now finish this install as you would any other.

Final thoughts

I am confident when Windows 7 is finally released this process won’t be necessary. But if you need to test out Windows 7 now, this is the way to go.

Recently, however, I have adopted a new way of working with all of the various operating systems I have to deal with. Virtual Machines. By using virtual machines I have the best of all possible worlds at my fingertips. Let’s take a peek at exactly how I am doing this and why.

VirtualBox

You will remember a while back I covered VirtualBox. If you missed those articles, here they are:

• Installing and configuring VirtualBox for virtual OSes.
• Installing Windows XP as a virtual machine in VirtualBox.
• Install Guest Additions for a better VirtualBox experience.

Once you have read through the above articles you will be familiar enough with VirtualBox that you will understand the concepts of this article better.

Why I chose Virtual Machines over standard methods

As I stated earlier, I am constantly having to install, re-install, uninstall, etc various operating systems. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to keep an installation for testing as I install another operating system. This is all fine and good and dual booting certainly has its pros and cons. But ultimately being able to save a machine state and close the OS has advantages that dual booting simply can not touch. Here are some obvious reason to use virtual machines over standard methods:

Cost: Instead of having to burn through CDs/DVDs you can download ISO images directly to your drive and install a virtual machine from there. You will also require less hard disk space since the Virtual Machine will use dynamic-sized virtual drives.

Time: No more rebooting into a different OS. Save your OS state and shut it down. The next time you need that OS start the VM and it will return in the exact same state it was in when you saved it.

Efficiency: While you’re installing a new virtual machine you can continue working on the same PC. The installation of the VM happens within its own window allowing you to go about your business.

Testing: I often test a lot of software and sometimes in the testing I can fubar an perfectly good installation. Saving states allows you to go back to a previously saved state prior to the fubar’ing.

Stability: I use a laptop for my Windows work. That laptop has Vista Home Premium installed. Yeah. Needless to say I am constantly having to baby that OS to keep it running right. Prior to using Virtual Machines I would have to reboot from Linux to Windows and hope that the Vista install was still working properly. Now, thanks to Virtual Machines, I just fire up the VM from the last working saved state and all is well. I am still working within a much more familiar (and stable IMHO) host operating system – Ubuntu.

Space saving: Prior to employing virtual machines my office was littered with PCs. Now it’s free and clear (and the office is much cooler without all of those PCs taking up space), because all of my “machines” are housed in one simple environment.

Drawbacks

There is but one real drawback to this setup. You have to have a machine powerful enough to dedicate the resources to the virtual machines. My laptop has 3 gigs of RAM. When running Vista on its own you would think it was a machine from a decade ago. Using VMs I can run a host OS and a couple of guests without seeing much of a decline is performance. Now I will suggest not using KDE 4 as your guest desktop. Stick with either GNOME or a lighter weight desktop so to save resources for more important work.

Final thoughts

I hope this article has helped you understand why virtual machines are the way to go when you need multiple OSes for multiple reasons. I have not had a single problem since employing VMs for all of my testing purposes. I hope you find yourself having the same experience. Have you employed Virtual Machines for your work? If so, tell us why.

In my default setup of Windows XP, on my particular Ubuntu 9.04 box, the installation of Windows XP rendered a perfectly usable desktop with 32 bit colors in 800×600 resolution. This resolution, of course, is not ideal for some situations (such as Full Screen mode). In order to get a higher resolution, along with other features, you have to install Guest Additions. This is a simple process that can be done quickly and yields a much better user experience than the default. So…let’s get to the installation.

Figure 1

Before you attempt to do the installation of the guest additions you have to have your virtual machine up and running. Once that VM is running you will see three menu entries at the top of the window: Machine, Devices, and Help. You want to click on the Devices entry and then click the Install Guest Additions entry (see Figure 1).

What you will see is a warning message instructing you that the Guest Additions CD image could not be found. Fear not, this is normal. Click Yes in order to download the image and then Download to confirm. You will see a progress bar at the bottom left of your VM window.

When that download has finished you will be asked if you want to Mount the image. Click the Mount button to reveal the Sun xVM setup wizard. Click Next in the welcome screen which will take you to the license agreement window. Click the I Agree button (and read the license if you feel so inclined.)

Figure 2

What you are now doing is a fairly straightforward Windows application-like installation. The only “gotcha” during installation will be a warning that the software did not pass the Windows Logo testing. Ignore this warning and click Continue Anyway. Your screen will flicker for a second – don’t worry.

You will see this warning another time when it attempts to install software for the pointing devices.

After that warning the installation will complete and, in typical Windows fashion, you will be required to reboot your virtual machine. Do this. When the reboot completes you will find your virtual machine much easier to work with. Now:

• You no longer have to capture the mouse pointer.
• You can set your resolution to a much higher level.
• You can now copy and paste between guest and host operating systems.
• You can run Windows in seamless mode.

Seamless mode

Figure 3

Seamless mode is a very interesting trick. What this does is take the elements of Windows out of the VM window and layer them on top of your Linux desktop.

As you can see, in Figure 3, with seamless mode activated all Windows applications have their own window. So in this instance Internet Explorer appears to be running on Linux by itself. And the Windows task bar is resting nicely on top of the GNOME panel.

You toggle between seamless and non-seamless mode by pressing the Hot Key and the “L” key. The default Hot Key is the right Ctrl key.

Final thoughts

This is truly some exciting work. With the help of VirtualBox you can, effectively, have your cake and eat it too (as the saying goes.) Work with Windows applications inside of Linux without needing the help of Wine.

Now I am using the open source version of VirtualBox so no USB support is included. Outside of that – everything should work exactly as expected.

Figure 1

Before you actually read this article make sure you have read through the first article and have VirtualBox installed.Once installed you can fire up VirtualBox and you will see a window similar to that in Figure 1. The only difference being that in my example there is already a virtual machine installed. And even though the currently installed VM is Windows XP, we can still install another XP instance. You can have as many instances of a single OS as you want so long as you have the room for it.

With that said, let’s begin the process.

The first thing to do is to click the New button which will start up the Wizard. This wizard, just like the setup wizard shown in the original article, is very user-friendly and makes for installing a virtual machine a breeze.

The first screen is just a welcome screen – click the Next button to move on to the first real interactive screen.

Figure 2

OS Name/Type

The first screen (shown in Figure 2) will require you to give the VM a name and select the operating system. Since I already have a VM called Windows XP I will name this new version something different.

After you have configured the name and the OS type click the Next button to move on.

Virtual Memory

The next screen requires you to select the amount of memory you want to dedicate to your Virtual Machine. Use caution with this setting. You have to still have enough memory left for your host operating system to run. By default VirtualBox will offer you the minimum required to run the virtual machine. This is fine if you don’t plan on doing much with the VM. If, however, you plan on running particular applications that are memory intensive, you should bump up the virtual memory a bit.

Hard Drive

This next screen was explained in detail in the original article – refer back to that for details. Once you have finished that section, you are ready to finalize your virtual machine and begin installation. Click Finish and you’re ready.

Powering it on

Now put your OS cd into the CD drive, select the virtual machine you want to use, and click the Start button. The first thing you will see is an information box instructing you how to capture and rekease your cursor. This is important to know, otherwise you will find yourself not being able to use your mouse outside of VirtualBox. To capture the cursor in VirtualBox you just click the mouse inside of the machine window. To release the cursor you hit the Ctrl key on the right side of your keyboard. That’s it. Click through that warning and you’re ready to rock.

Figure 3

What happens now is pretty much a standard installation of Windows. This will generally take about the same amount of time a normal installation will take. When you are finished you will have a working install of Windows XP (as shown in Figure 3).

You will notice XP is inside of a window. Within that window is a menu with three choices. One of those menus you will use quite often is the Machine menu. Of course you can not get to it if the virtual machine has captured your cursor. If you are working within your VM, and you want to get to that menu, click the right Ctrl key and your cursor is released.

From the Machine menu you can do a number of things such as:

• Change the view mode to full screen.
• Take a snapshot of the current state of your virtual machine.
• Pause your virtual machine.
• Shutdown your virtual machine.
• Close your virtual machine.

Figure 4

Instead of going through the standard process of shutting down Windows XP the easiest method of shutdown is to first Pause the virtual machine and then Close the virtual machine. When you pause the VM the screen will turn gray (see Figure 4) and you can then close that machine.

When you click Close you will see another window asking if you want to just close the machine or if you want to save the machine state before you close it. If you haven’t saved the machine recently go ahead and select save machine state.

Now when you start that Virtual Machine back up it will start up in the same state it was when you closed it. Imagine starting up Windows XP in less than 5 seconds! That is what you will experience when starting a virtual machine from a saved state.

When all of your machines are closed you can then exit VirtualBox from the File menu of the main window.

Final thoughts

I hope your experience with VirtualBox is as good as mine. I have used a number of virtual machine software – from costly proprietary to free open source and I have to say that VirtualBox is one of the best.

VirtualBox is easy to install – as easy as any other Linux application found within your distributions’ repositories. For this article we will be using Ubuntu Desktop 9.04. There will be no need to add any repository information.

Installing VirtualBox

As already stated, you will find VirtualBox within the repository of the Ubuntu distribution. So to install VirtualBox open up the Add/Remove Applications utility (found in the Applications menu), do a search for “virtualbox” (no quotes), select the correct results, and click the Apply to install the software.

After Virtualbox is installed there is one thing you must take care of. Without adding your user to the vboxusers group you will never be able to run VirtualBox as a standard user.

Adding the user to the group

Figure 1

This is actually quite easy. Go to the System menu and click on the Administration submenu. From that submenu select the Users and Groups entry. In the window that opens (see Figure 1) you will click the Manage Groups button. But before you click that button select a user and then click the Unlock button. This will give you administrative rights for this tool (you will have to enter your user password).

When this new window opens scroll all the way down until you see the vboxusers group. Select that group and then click

Figure 2

Properties. In this new window (see Figure 2) select the user you want to add to the group and then select OK.

You can now close out the Groups and the Users tools. You are ready to start using Virtualbox.

Starting VirtualBox

You will find the VirtualBox listing in the Accessories submenu of the Applications menu. Click on that and VirtualBox will start.

Before you can actually start installing a virtual machine you have to take care of some administrative tasks. Never fear, though, this is all handled by a very easy to use Wizard that will walk you through every step of the way. The only instance you might get tripped up is Virtual Hard

Figure 3

Disk step. Before VirtualBox can install an OS it has to have a virtual hard drive. This will happen around step 4 of the wizard (see Figure 3). In order to create a new virtual hard drive you have to click the New button. This will then take you into a completely different wizard. Again, this wizard is very simple and walks you through step by step.

Once you have created a virtual hard drive you will be taken back to the same screen as you were in for step 4. The only difference is your virtual hard drive will now be listed. You can now click Next to move on. The final screen will give you all of the information you have configured and you can then click Finish.

You are now ready to create a virtual machine. In my next article we will discuss the process of of creating a virtual machine.

Final thoughts

VirtualBox is an outstanding tool with almost limitless possibility for any administrator, developer, or computer user. It’s simplicity is only outshined by its possibilities.

I would advise to begin by downloading the excellent user manual which should answer most questions about installing and configuring guest systems using Virtualbox. It takes some time to read through the 108 pages of the manual but it is well worth it to understand the functionality.

Just download the 10 megabyte file from the VirtualBox website or as a torrent and install the software. Installation is really easy in Windows (just a double-click) but a little bit more complicated in Linux. Check the user manual for a detailed instruction for Linux.

I do not want to explain a detailed instruction to setup a new guest system because the user manual explains everything in such great detail that it does not feel necessary at all. You basically create a new virtual machine and assign a name, ram and hard drive space to it and select a source for the installation of the guest system. The source can be from hard drive or cd for instance, just make sure you have the source at hand.