Epilogue: Ubuntu VM, The Shortcut
Joe M posted in Howto, free stuff, products on May 29th, 2009
After dragging readers through a grueling four part series dealing with VirtualBox and Ubuntu setup, I offer a shortcut.
The last four posts were a good experience, for anyone interested in getting their feet wet with virtualization, and what it means.
For the patient… Here is a quick and dirty.
Potentially, you can cut out several steps from Part II and Part III.
There are several pre-installed images for virtualization and VirtualBox located here at SourceForge.net, ready to download.
You’ll need a zip utility that will handle 7-zip files. 7-zip will do nicely.
If you are running Linux, use Synaptic Package Manager and the quick search for ‘7-zip’. You’ll find several options to install for handling *.7z files.
Once you install 7-zip or your choice of file compression utility, extract the image… and keep track of where you extract it.
I won’t go into all of the details this time, but during the setup, simply choose “Use existing hard disk”… and use the folder icon to navigate to the image and select it for the virtual machine. (That’s one of the folders that you extracted a few moments earlier.)
Finish the setup, and you are ready to go.
You have to use the corresponding link here to find the username and password used to create the image.
Just click the link and a list of images and usernames and passwords will display. Reference your download image version… and it should be pretty easy to find.
Once you do that, you can fire up your VM and have at it!
This is the VM for UbuntuStudio that I downloaded.
The longest part was waiting for the download, which took about 15 minutes.
All of the images offered at the site on Sourceforge are free.
You can still refer back to the previous four postings, if you happen to get stuck.
This will require you to install VirtualBox, do the VM setup… and you’ll probably want to install Guest Additions.
Using the downloaded image, will provide you with the opportunity to bypass the Ubuntu install.
You can also find more ready-made installs (called appliances, in some cases) with which to play around.
Enjoy!