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Historically, Linux has required its own private space on your hard disk. Achieving this required making some fairly fundamental alterations to the les on your hard disk that could result in all your data being lost if anything went wrong (although I've never known this happen). We will install it in a much safer way. If you don't already have Linux installed on your machine, I would recommend installing it as a Virtual Machine you run a program that pretends to be a separate computer and then install Linux on this virtual computer. Although this method of running Linux requires a more powerful computer than would be required to run it on its own, there are many advantages: you don't have to reboot your computer to use it, and you can use your normal programs at the same time as Linux programs (and indeed copy things between them). If you decide you don't require Linux any more, virtual machines are easy to delete.
Illustration 1: Opening screen for VirtualBox, ready to create a new virtual machine. Click on the New button to start the process of creating a new virtual machine, opening a window like the one shown in Illustration 2.
Illustration 2: The "Wizard" (helper) to create a new virtual machine. The next window, see Illustration 3, allow us give the virtual machine a name to distinguish it from any others we might install (and there is no reason why multiple machines couldn't be installed, or even run, simultaneously). We will call this virtual machine Ubuntu: the
operating system and version are lled in for us automatically but these are just labels to help organise things and are of little consequence.
Having chosen the right amount of memory for the virtual machine, we need to create a hard disk (actually a le on your current hard disk that the virtual machine is allowed to alter). This is done in several steps: rstly, as in Illustration 5, we create a new disk but we could reuse an old if we already had created one.
Illustration 5: Virtual hard disk for machine. Next we are asked for the type of virtual hard disk we would like to create. As shown in Illustration 6, this is just a list of formats that dierent virtual machine programs use and the
default option (VDI VirtualBox Disk Image) is perfectly ne. You might use the other options if you were creating a disk image for somebody else who used dierent virtual machine software. The window shown in Illustration 7 allows to choose between a xed size hard disk (the entire
Illustration 7: How storage is to be allocated. le is allocated at once) or a dynamic size (the le gets larger as needed but will be no larger than the size we ask for. There is a slight performance advantage to a xed size but we'll choose dynamic size so we don't create a huge le on the hard disk straight away. Illustration 8 Is a dialogue asking for the size of the hard disk to create (either dynamically or xed) we'll choose 8GB, which is enough for a toy Linux installation but probably not enough for real work. The recommended minimum amount for Ubuntu is 15GB.
Illustration 11: Changing the graphics capabilities. bring up the dialogue in Illustration 11, and select Display and increase the amount of video memory to 64MB (or more) and select Enable 3D Acceleration.
Illustration 12: Select media to install from. Ubuntu icon on Ubuntu Ubuntu installation CD image that we downloaded earlier. Clicking on the yellow folder-like the righthand side brings up a le selection window, see Illustration 13, nd the CD image and open it. Illustration 14 shows the virtual machine ready to boot the install CD.
2 Clicking on the virtual machine window captures all the keyboard input so things like using the keyboard to change windows may not work. Also, your mouse may disappear. Pressing the key mentioned in the window (left apple key on a Macintosh, right control key on Windows) frees both the keyboard and mouse so they will work as normal again.
Illustration 13: Selecting the Ubuntu CD image. Installing Ubuntu from here is left as an exercise and there is plenty of documentation available to help (e.g. http://www.ubuntu.com/support). Note: whenever the installation refers to your computer or your hard disk, it is taking about the virtual machine and it's disk not your computer. In particular, you will be asked if you'd like to use the whole hard disk to install Ubuntu, see Illustration 15, with suitably dire warnings about everything else being deleted. Here, it means the whole of the virtual hard disk and not your computer's hard disk
so it is safe to say yes. The are two ways you can conrm this: rstly, when you are asked about using the whole hard disk, Ubuntu notes that there is no operating system currently installed (your real hard disk would have). In the following window, the hard disk to be installed on will be called VBOX HARDDISK and will be quite small (we asked for about 8GB) compared to your real hard disk, which is probably several hundred GB. Installing Ubuntu will take about 30 minutes or so, depending on the speed of your computer.