'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean?
ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing.
When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers.
ZDNET's editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form.
How to create a Linux virtual machine with VirtualBox
Linux is everywhere -- in phones, smart appliances, cloud storage services, cars, thermostats, and just about everything with an embedded system or a major third-party service.
It can also be on your desktop. Linux is a fantastic choice as a desktop operating system because it's incredibly reliable, secure, and more flexible than any other OS on the market. But for those who might be hesitant to install Linux over macOS or Windows, what can you do? One route that makes it very easy to test and use Linux, without doing anything to your primary operating system, is the virtual machine route.
What is a virtual machine?
A virtual machine allows you to run a guest operating system on top of your host, without making any changes (other than installing the virtual machine platform) to your primary operating system. My virtual machine platform of choice is called VirtualBox, which can be installed on Linux, macOS, and Windows hosts. VirtualBox is free and very easy to use.
I'm going to walk you through the process of creating a Linux virtual machine with VirtualBox, so you can give the open-source operating system a try. I won't walk you through the process of installing VirtualBox, as that's as simple as installing any application on your computer.
With that said, let's get our virtual machine up and running.
Creating the virtual machine
1. Open VirtualBox
The first thing you'll do is open VirtualBox from your computer's desktop menu. Once the application is open, click Tools and then click New (Figure 1).
The VirtualBox main window shows I've already created quite a few virtual machines.
2. Name your new guest operating system
I'm going to spin up a virtual machine for FerenOS, which is a Linux distribution. In the first window of the wizard (Figure 2), give the virtual machine a name, select the folder to house the files, select the type of operating system for the new virtual machine and the version, and then click Next.
Naming our new virtual machine.
3. Configure RAM
In the next window, slide the Memory size slider to the right to increase the amount of RAM you want to allot to the machine (Figure 3).
Configuring the RAM for our new virtual machine.
4. Create a virtual hard disk
Click Next and, in the resulting window (Figure 4), click Create to create a new virtual hard disk.
Creating a new virtual hard drive for our guest OS.
In the next two windows, select VDI and then Dynamically allocated. In the final window, slide the slider to the right to increase the size of the virtual hard disk to however large you need, and make sure to select the folder to house the drive (Figure 5).
Sizing the virtual hard drive to meet your needs.
Click Create and you'll be returned to the VirtualBox main window.
Configure your guest operating system
We can now configure our guest operating system. One thing you'll want to make sure to do (before you take this step) is to download the ISO file for the version of Linux you want to install.
1. Add the ISO image for installation
Select the virtual machine you just created from the left pane and then click Settings. In the resulting window, click Storage and then click the left + associated with Controller: IDE (Figure 6).
This is where you configure all aspects of your virtual machine.
In the resulting window (Figure 7), click Add, and when your file manager opens, navigate to wherever it is you saved the ISO image for the Linux distribution you downloaded.
Adding an ISO image for installation.
Once you've selected your ISO image, click Choose and then OK. You should now find yourself back at the VirtualBox main window, where you're ready to run the virtual machine.
Start the installation
Select the virtual machine you just created in the left navigation and click the Start button, which will launch the bootable image and -- depending on the Linux distribution you've chosen -- should land you at either the live image (where you can either test or install the guest operating system) or immediately install the guest (Figure 8).
You can now install Linux as your guest operating system.
Make sure to go through the full installation process for the guest operating system you've chosen. In most cases, that will require clicking the Install icon on the desktop.
Congratulations, you just created your first virtual machine with Linux as a guest operating system. Enjoy kicking the tires of your new open-source platform.