Let us start from our previous post. Our virtual box now looks like given below:

Now we click on System tab and select General

Make changes to snapshot folders as you wish. Keep the clipboard and Drag’n'Drop to bidirectional. Now let us select System

Allocate at least 2GB and more if you desire. I have 12G and allocated 8G. Enable IO APIC for multiple CPUs. Leave others as they are. Let us move to processor portion.

I have quad core CPU and I have allocated all. You should enable PAE for more than 4G RAM support to VM.

Let us move to Display portion:

Allocate as much VRAM as you want. It hardly makes a difference as you will not be installing games on Linux I reckon. I have nVidia 570GTX but cannot allocate more than 128MB. Enable 3D acceleration for OpenGL. 2D is only for Windows host so wont work. I have one monitor so I chose one if you have more you can increase monitor count. Let us move to shared folders as not much is there in other sections:

Click on the Add icon highlighted in the picture:

Choose other then point to whichever you want to share. I select Auto mount and entire D: but you can add more drives if you want. You can also mount read only. Now it should look like following

That is all system is ready to boot. In next post I will show installation of Linux Mint KDE 14.

Let us launch VirtualBox which we installed in previous post. You will see a screen similar to one given below.

Step 1: Note that I already have three VMs. Two having state saved and one powered off. You will have none if you did just a fresh install.

Click on New to see following:

Step 2:

Since Mint is not recognized by VirtualBox I have chosed “Other Linux”. Name is what you want to name your virtual machine. Click on next for next step.

Step 3:

I have 12GB RAM and I am allocating 8G to my virtual machine because I am inside my Mint installation most of the time. Windows is just for booting and launching VM. Make sure you give at least 2GB RAM and in total you have more than 4GB. Click on next for next step.

Step 4:

Choose option 2 because we want to do a new installation. The entire file system will be inside this file as an image. Click on next.

Step 5:

Choose vdi format here. I will not go in details of when should you choose which one here. Click on next.

Step 6:

We do not want entire space to be allocated up front therefore choose dynamically allocated.

Step 7:

Drag it to show 40G. If you want more give more. Typically this much is enough for Linux box because we can keep data in Windows folder and access though sharing. We can install all we want in 40G and some data as well.

Step 8:

This is where your image will be stored so make sure you have enough space in C: or change it to D: or something else where you will always have 40G.

Step 9:

When you say cancel or select in step 8 and then “Create” in 7 you will have your Example VM ready. In our next post we will customize it further.

Virtual Box will be used as a virtualization software for GNU/Linux Installation in later posts. There are advantages and disadvantages of a virtual installation. In a VM you can run both OS in parallel and today’s machine are powerful enough to run both easily. It is also good for new people as you do not have the need to be afraid that what will happen to Windows in case something goes wrong etc. This is just like installing an application. First of all you need to go to https://www.virtualbox.org/ and the go to downloads page. Over there select for Windows hosts. As of this writing 4.2.12 is latest version. Download that. Then double click the downloaded file and follow following steps as shown in images.

Installing VirtualBox

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Step 5:

Step 6:

Step 7:

At this point it is installed and you should reboot Windows. In next post we will see how to install GNU/Linux Mint on top of this VB.