• Download Ubuntu Virtualbox Image

VirtualBox is a virtual machine application now available to Linux users. VirtualBox also runs on Windows PCs and Macs. You can install a virtual.

Having configured a virtual machine for Ubuntu on Virtual-box on my mac air I need to install Ubuntu OS itself. I have selected the hard-drive as the primary boot device and the network as the secondary boot device, so I am not prompted to install an Ubuntu disk at boot time. It attempts to net-boot but is unable to locate Ubuntu and I cannot find anywhere in the configuration where I can explicitly specify where to find an Ubuntu image, so I assume it reverts to some default location and fails. Has anybody out there ever successfully installed Ubuntu on virtual box on their Mac Air?

What steps did you take to get it right?. When you open VirtualBox, click on NEW and create your virtual machine. You can basically keep clicking next until you are back at the start menu. Select your new machine, and click Start. This will open a Wizard that will guide you through the installation process.

You will need to download an Ubuntu.iso image from their website. You will use it as the installation media.

Download Ubuntu Virtualbox Image

If your Macbook is from this year or last year, get the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 12.04. You will then go through the standard Ubuntu installation (in the virtual computer, of course). When you are done, be sure to install VM extensions (when you restart the first time, Ubuntu will offer 'Additional Drivers', which allow the OS to interact better with the virtual hardware.

You can further customize your machine when it is powered off, by right clicking on it and going to preferences.

Ubuntu is telling you it will use the entire disk, yes, but since Ubuntu is running under virtualization, the 'entire disk' is referring to the virtual disk you very probably created when creating the virtual machine in the first place. The virtual disk, by default, is just a large file on your actual physical disk. It is possible to tell VirtualBox to use an actual physical disk for your virtual machine, but that's not the default behaviour, and you have to go out of your way a little bit to set it up as such. So, unless you actually took those extra steps, my first paragraph is almost certainly what applies to your situation.

There are a couple of things to know and a couple of things to check. First off, virtualbox is a way to isolate and create a miniature machine inside of a bigger machine. This being said once you have created the disk space for the Virtual Machine, all it sees it that small space you gave it.

In the above picture you see the Virtual Box set up screen, this is the main screen where you set the size of disk for the Operating system. Once this has been set and you go through the other settings you are good. At this point you will start the Virtual Machine, the way Virtual Box works is that that machine only sees that disk, it thinks that it is on a computer all by itself with whatever sized hard drive you set. So you can go ahead and set it to fill that size, but I still check during set up that the disk size is what I allocated during the Machine Setup in the picture above.

From here you should be good to go to set it up and run it.