Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and yes you can run Ubuntu on a mac on a virtual machine for free with Sun’s VirtualBox. In fact, you can run just about any operating system you want to all within a window inside OSX.
Running a virtual machine is nothing new on Macs. Ever since Apple moved to Intel processors, virtualization came along for the ride. Virtualization means that you can run computer operating systems that are designed for Windows PC hardware on Macintosh.
There are two main players for creating virtual machines on Macs, Parallels and VMware Fusion. Both of those products are great, but they cost $70 each. If you are like me, and you have no real reason to run alternate operating systems, $70 is a lot to pay just to play around.
Last week, while I was listening to Twit.tv’s MacBreak Weekly, Leo Laporte talked about a program from Sun that allows you to create virtual machines for free. Sun’s VirtualBox is a full-featured machine virtualization solution. Creating a Linux virtual machine was extremely easy.
I downloaded VirtualBox and installed it on my computer. I downloaded the latest ISO file of Ubuntu and saved it on my desktop.
I opened VirtualBox and simply followed the instructions on the wizard that started when I first opened VirtualBox. I created a new virtual machine and then installed Ubuntu.
I was a little nervous doing it for the first time, but it didn’t take too much geekiness to get it all working. If you are somewhat good with computers, this should be no problem.
Right now, I am writing this blog post inside Linux on a virtual machine on my MacBook. It works.
I don’t really know what I will do with this other than simply play, but I was afraid that once I moved over to Apple computers full time, I would lose my chance to play with Linux. Now, that is no longer true.
The only problem I am having is I can’t make the screen any bigger than 800 x 600. That is a little confining, but I bet if I up my video RAM, that will be fixed.
Anyway, it is fun to geek it up every once in a while.
