Welcome back. This next portion of the VirtualBox tutorial is going to go over setting up a virtual machine to install your desired operating system on. At this point you should have already covered the easy installation steps of VirtualBox Part 1.
Starting up VirtualBox should present the main screen. <sarcasm> I’m sure this is very counterintuitive for a lot of you out there but press the New button to create a new VM </sarcasm>
VirtualBox provides us with a wizard that makes this whole process pretty painless. Click next to get started.
You’ll need to name your virtual machine and select what kind of OS you’ll be installing. You can name it whatever you want, and there is a selection for your most common operating systems. I’m going to use XP for the example. The reason being the same as why most of us still keep a copy of Windows around, because there is that one application we still can’t do without.
The next step in the wizard asks how much RAM you would like to turn over to your virtual machine. It has a recommendation already entered for you. I don’t know what would happen by assigning an unusual amount of RAM to a virtual OS. It would probably work just fine, but I feel more comfortable assigning a more familiar number. I’m assigning 512mb here. That’s generally XP’s sweet spot and I have the RAM to spare. Also I want the application I’m going to be using to be reasonably functional. I would recommend against giving it more RAM than is installed in your system. Adjust the slide bar or enter the figure in manually to the text box to assign your RAM.
Now we need to create a virtual hard disk. There are none existing at this point, and unless I’m deleting a previous VM, I’m not sure what the point of using an existing virtual disk would be. Bottom line; click “New” to create a new disk.
Another wizard is going to pop up. Click “Next” and you’ll get a choice between a dynamic and fixed-sized image. Dynamic images will only be as large as the data stored on the virtual machine. If you create a 10 gigabyte virtual disk and you only have 3 gigabytes combined data from your operating system and applications, then you are only storing 3 gigabytes of data on your actual hard disk. This is useful if free space is at a premium or you are using a lot of VMs. The downside is a cost in performance, slowing down your virtual machine session.
Contrast to a fixed-size image, where if you create a 10 gig virtual disk, you are going to take up 10 gigs actual hard disk space. If you have plenty of disk space to spare, then not only will you receive better performance, you won’t have to worry about VirtualBox running out of disk space as your virtual disk expands.
Given all of that the choice is yours. It doesn’t affect much else from this point on. I’ve selected “Dynamically expanding image” on this tutorial because I am running on a laptop with limited drive space. Make your selection and click “Next”.
You’ll need to label your image file in the blank field marked “Image File Name”. I’m keeping mine the same as my virtual machine name for clarity. Adjust the slide or enter a number for the image size just as you did for the RAM setting. Click “Next”
Final screen for the Virtual Disk creation just gives a summary of what was selected.
Clicking “Finish” returns me to the previous wizard. My newly created virtual disk has been selected. Click “Next” again.
Again at the end of the wizard we get another summary page. Clicking Finish will return me back to the main VirtualBox screen.
You’ll see a new entry in the list to the left showing your new virtual machine, its current state, and details regarding the virtual hardware to the right.
Before installing an operating system on to the VM, let go through some of the additional settings. Select the virtual machine just created and click on “Settings”. From the Settings window you can create additional virtual disks, mount CDs, and adjust hardware properties for your VM.
Select the CD/DVD-ROM tab so we can mount your Windows install disk.
Check the box next to “Mount CD/DVD Drive”. You can use and actual CD or DVD by selecting “Host CD/DVD Drive”. I’ve actually had better luck using an ISO image I made to backup my CD so I recommend the second option.
To choose an ISO image, click the folder icon on the right side of the window.
It will bring up the Virtual Disk Manager. Click the Add button on the top tool bar.
Browse and select the ISO image you want to use as a CD. Click Open.
The image will now be listed in the Virtual Disk Manager. Highlight the image from the list and click “Select”
At this point we can install Windows onto the virtual machine. Depending on how you are going to use your VM your can go into the Audio tab and select the type of audio device you want to simulate, and add USB devices under the USB tab. At this point we just want to get up and running so we’ll worry about that later. Press OK to return to the main VirtualBox screen.
Click the Start button at the top of the window and the virtual machine should start to boot.
First time around you’ll get a Information box explaining the “host key”. Basically, when working within a virtual machine, the computers keyboard and mouse are taken over by the VM. The “host key” toggles control of the keyboard and mouse between the virtual machine and the real computers operating system. So, if you are working within your virtual machine and suddenly your email client dings because you’ve received a new message, you can’t check it while your stuck in the VM window. Press the host key and you can now go check your email. By default this is the Ctrl key on the right.
If you got a grasp on this, go ahead and check the “Do not show this message again” box and click OK to continue. The VM will start to boot and before you know it you are running the Windows XP setup off your CD image.
The Windows XP installation will proceed like any other. I’m not going to bother covering it here because it has no relation to how VirtualBox works. If you are following along go ahead and finish your Windows install and pickup here when you’ve finished.
Next posting will cover how to get USB working under your virtual machine.
