Visit VirtualBox and click on the big blue button to get to the Virtualbox download page. You can remove those files any time, but then you will lose your installation. If you turn off your guest operating system, then all that is freed up and it will only take up space on your hard-disk. just like any other application on your system. When your guest operating system is running it is allocated a certain amount of memory, CPU, etc. The Operating System installed in it, which we'll refer to as the guest, won't really know it is not running on real hardware.įrom the point of view of your operating system, the one that you already have on your computer (Most likely some version of MS Windowsor Mac OSX) it is just a directory with a few files in it. It will have some memory, CPUs, disk(s), a CD player, a video card with some memory, and one or more network cards. From the inside a virtual computer looks like any other computer.

VirtualBox is an application that can run on MS Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux While we are waiting for it to download, let's do something else: We'll use the downloaded file in a minute. (The 1 is just a sub-release number, not the date.)Īn ISO image is a single file that looks like a CD-rom from the inside. At the time of this writing it is Ubuntu Server 17.10.1īecause it was released in 2017 October.

Download, install, and configure VirtualBox.

Download the ISO image of Ubuntu Server.

In this article we are going to use Ubuntu, one of the most popular distributions. There are many distributions DistroWatch has a list of the 'top 100'. A 'distribution' is a package in which some team has collected much useful software: editors, games, databases, web servers, etc.

On the other hand most people use the word 'Linux' to describe a 'Linux Distribution' that includes 10s of thousands of programs, including the Linux kernel.

On one hand Linux officially refers to the 'Linux kernel' which is the core of what makes a computer work for you.

Ubuntu server vdi image