Virtualization Setup

In this lesson, I will show you everything you need to know about setting up a virtualization environment on your local computer. The experience of installing a local instance of Linux where you are free to experiment, break, and fix is invaluable to your Linux journey!

We have chosen VirtualBox as our virtualization software because it's free and compatible with both Windows and Linux. If are familiar with another virtualization platform you are free to use that as well! The main goal of this lesson is to create a VM that is on a network with internet access.

Download VirtualBox

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The interface for VirtualBox may look different than the screenshots in this lesson. Don't worry! The core features we are using (VM, networking) will still be there!

Visit virtualbox.org, and click the download link to open the downloads page. Once you reach the downloads page, you can select a download appropriate for your OS. They have options for Windows, MacOS, and other Linux distributions:

VirtualBox Downloads Page

Download the appropriate version for your operating system.

Installing VirtualBox

Now that you have VirtualBox downloaded launch the installer:

VirtualBox Installation

Continue with the default options to complete the installation. Once VirtualBox has been installed, go ahead and launch VirtualBox before proceeding.

Create your Linux VM

The next thing we need to do is create the VM (virtual machine) that we will use to install and run our Linux distribution.

For any Linux distro you plan to install, you should research the minimum system requirements and make sure you can supply at least those before installation. In this case, we plan to install Ubuntu Server, we wi…