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Installing Ubuntu: Obtaining Files Required
Installing Ubuntu: Obtaining Files Required
Historically, Linux has required its own private space on your hard disk. Achieving this required
making some fairly fundamental alterations to the files 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.
operating system and version are filled 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 file on your current hard disk that the virtual machine is allowed to alter).
This is done in several steps: firstly, as in Illustration 5, we create a new disk but we could
reuse an old if we already had created one.
default option (VDI VirtualBox Disk Image) is perfectly fine. You might use the other options
if you were creating a disk image for somebody else who used different virtual machine
software.
The window shown in Illustration 7 allows to choose between a fixed size hard disk (the entire
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.
so it is safe to say yes. The are two ways you can confirm this: firstly, 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.