When you first bring VirtualBox up, you may see something like this. Ha, you thought you were done installing stuff.
Not quite yet.
Go to
www.virtualbox.org
and download the "VirtualBox Extension Pack". The version should match the version of VirtualBox installed on your computer.
NOTE: For some reason this causes some confusion. The VirtualBox Guest Additions are NOT the same things as the VirtualBox Extension Pack. Make sure you download the right one. Usually you don't need the Guest Additions, they should have gotten installed in the previous post above. You usually only need the Extension Pack. It would be nice if Oracle would let vendors have this in their repos, but alas, such is not the case. Most distro (I won't say "all") have the guest additions available in their repos.
Click on the extension Pack link.
Go ahead and download the Extension Pack. Usually this will go into your Downloads directory.
Now back in VirtualBox, click on the Tools Menu on the left side, and then select Extension.
Navigate to your Downloads directory, or wherever you downloaded the Extension to, you should see the Extension Pack in the list here. Go ahead and click on [Open] at the bottom.
You will probably get a warning about how this might blow up your computer. If you're the trusting kind, go ahead and click on [Install]
Next, we get the always fun reading, VirtualBox License agreement from Oracle. Notice the [I Agree] and [I Disagree] buttons are greyed out here. It forces you to scroll to the bottom of the license agreement.
Once you've done all that, you should see the extension pack listed under your tools menu. Great, now we are finally ready to start creating a VM. I am assuming you already have an installer iso downloaded to your home directory. If not, go ahead and download one now, You'll need it before the next steps.
Click on the "Machine" tab, and then click on "New".
You will need to fill in a few things here. Type in the name of the VM you want to use This can be anything that makes sense to you. Usually the "Folder" section will already be populated with your home directory. Then click on the little down arrow at the far right of where it says "ISO Image". Navigate to wherever your installer iso is, and select it. Click on [Next].
Now you need to set how much RAM, and how many CPUs you want to allocate to this VM. Also, this is where you enable EFI for your VM if you want to. I'm not sure why it says (special OSes only) most Linux Linux distros support it, but some do not.
Next you need to set a hard drive size. By default it selects 8GB. That is usually too small in my experience. I would recommend 20GB or larger if you have space.
NOTE: It says I have 2TB of disk available. That is not actually true. This is a 512GB drive in that computer. What this means is I can create 2TB of sparse drives. My 20GB drive won't actually take up 20GB. It gets larger as you install more stuff. You can select "Pre-allocate Full Size", and then it will really use 20GB of disk space. ( or whatever size you create ). Click on [Next].
Now you get a summary screen, showing your configuration of the VM. If everything looks good. Go ahead and click on [Finish].
Now you will see your new VM on the left side. You can either double click on it to start it, or click on the big green arrow that says "Start".
A new console will pop up, and you will see the boot menu of your new VM.
This really isn't a tutorial of how to install Linux, we have plenty of those in other places. But now you be far enough along to know what to do the rest of the way. Just install it as your would normally.
That's it for this tutorial. Happy Linux'ing!
