I chose to use dynamically expanding disks, which start out at 0MB, and can grow in size with the needs of the guest operating system. Both were set up with 256MB of virtual RAM and a 5GB virtual hard disk. Using Virtualbox’s New Virtual Machine Wizard, I created virtual machines for each OS. I first tested the latest release of Virtualbox with Mandriva 2007 Spring and Fedora 7, both of which have live GNOME installer CDs. Membership in the vboxusers group is required to give a user the necessary permissions to run Virtualbox. The only downside regarding installation was that while the installer was nice enough to create the vboxusers user group for me, I had to manually add my username to it. Sudo apt-get update & sudo apt-get install virtualbox Next, I imported a security key to validate the downloaded application files:Īnd finally, I installed the program itself: Sudo su -c 'echo deb feisty non-free > /etc/apt/sources.list' For the installation, I chose to follow the method from the official site to install Virtualbox under Ubuntu via APT using the following commands.įirst I added the Innotek repository to my sources.list file with the command I tested Virtualbox on a AMD Sempron 2800+ desktop with 1GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 7300GS video adapter. In addition, I’ve been eager to try out several new releases of popular Linux distributions, such as Mandriva and Fedora. This makes things such as taking screenshots of the OS easier.

I like to use virtualization to set up testing environment to run a live CD Linux distribution without powering off my primary OS. Now that I’ve tried it, I’m happy to report it works just as well as its 32-bit sibling. However, my main PC at home utilizes a 64-bit version of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, and Virtualbox didn’t support 64-bit OSes - until this month.

I’ve been using Virtualbox for several months now on a 32-bit laptop running Ubuntu 7.04, and I’ve been impressed with the software. Innotek’s GPL-licensed Virtualbox software lets you create a virtual operating environment inside your PC’s real operating system.

Virtualbox 64 bit