Suppose you want to try any flavor of Linux such as Ubuntu or Knoppix but do not want to take pain of installing it.The pain is caused mostly due to difficulty in installation because you want to keep your Windows Installation Intact.While there are Live Bootable CDs available which can run the OS on the fly,they do not provide the optimal experience.They are also limited in the sense that you cannot install any other application on the live running OS.
The other method to try these Operating Systems is using Virtual OS managers.What they do is to produce an environment where an operating system can be installed on top of your current native Operating System.Here is a brief introduction to such softwares.
Installing Virtual Operating System on top of your existing OS
There are some popular virtualization managers like Microsoft’s Virtual PC,VMware workstation and Virtual Box form Sun.
Virtual Box from Sun Microsystems
Virtual box is actually a collection of various virtual machine programs.In their own words-
With VirtualBox, you can run unmodified operating systems — including all of the software that is installed on them — directly on top of your existing operating system, in a special environment called a “virtual machine”. Your physical computer is then usually called the “host”, while the virtual machine is often called a “guest”.
Virtual box runs on almost all operating systems and supports almost all of them as Guest operating system too.
What happens when you install a guest operating system using Virtual Box?
when you install virtual box and configure it to install a guest OS ,it creates a virtual Hard Disk,allocates a predefined amount of RAM from your memory and uses your Processor’s virtualization capability(if it has) to make an environment suitable for installing a new operating system.All this is done in a very sophisticated manner so that your current OS does not know that any more OS is installed on top of it.Also virtual box handles all processes so that you can communicate between your host and guest OS.
How to use Virtual Box
Download Virtual Box (it’s FREE) and install it.Upon starting you will get a welcome screen as shown here-
Click on new.You should get ‘New Virtual Machine Wizard’
In the following window shown in right above,you have to write the name of the guest OS,say My Linux if you want to install Linux as a guest OS.Then select the type of OS and version from the drop down menu.
In the coming screens you will need to configure base memory you want to allocate to your virtual OS and a virtual Hard disk to be used by the guest OS.When you have configured it you will get the final windows as the following-
Just click on start and you are ready to go.It will ask for an installation media which you can select as an ISO file or CD/DVD ROM.Now install it as you normally install any OS on a new computer and enjoy.
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