Free Virtualisation with VirtualBox

Once installed a nice entry in KDE and GNOME's menus is created. The final step is making sure that users that need to create a VirtualBox guest system need to be added to the vboxusers group.

So the next step is to fireup the nice VirtualBox GUI and setup a new guest operating system. This is as simple as telling it how much hardrive space you want to give to it as the guest's harddrive, how much system memory you want to give. Obviously here the more memory in your computer (the host) the better. You can even specifiy the video graphics memory. Various other options are available like floppy drive access, USB devices, audio devices and DVD/CD players.

Once you have setup your guest operating system's virtual computer you can go about the business of installing your operating system. I chose to do a internet install of Fedora Core 3, due to it being compatible for the server software I needed. Also internet installs really show off the flexibility of Linux. I downloaded a small boot ISO cd image to get things going.

The next step is to boot up the cd image. In VirtualBox you can just attach the image to the cd then start the new virtual system which then boots the cd image. The fun part of this is then watching the install process in a window of your current (host) operating system. You can just install your operating system as you would normally do and leave it in the background whilst you get on with other things. Then hopefully when the operating is installed you can boot it up in a window and use it like a normal computer. You can also tell it to go to full screen if you need to.

Unfortunately in the end I didn't need it as I managed to get hold of the correct files I needed to use my main Fedora Core 6 server without virtualisation.