It’s a Virtual World. We are all Programs

Virtual machines can be very useful. Think of it as running an operating system within an operating system. Software such as VMWare and VirtualBox all users to do this. 

Why you want to use a virtual machine?

• Test an Operating System/Software – Scared of trying out the latest operating system from Microsoft? Don’t want software messing with your registry? Use a virtual machine. User’s can even test out Linux operating system, from Ubuntu to Fedora, VirtualBox and VMWare provide support for both.
• Viruses/Spyware/Malware – The internet, as we all know, isn’t so friendly. Without warning, your computer can be infected with a virus,spyware or malware. “But I use the latest anti-virus software!” Really? First, you must keep your anti-virus up to date, that way when you run a scan, your anti-virus has the latest definitions. People don’t often do this. Secondly, to actually catch these viruses, you must perform a scan, find it and get the tools to remove it. Some of us don’t do this. Virtual Machines, if infected, you can revert to a previous state, or you can delete the entire machine without formatting or reinstalling your primary operating system.
• Recovery and Restore are Simple – Afraid your virtual machine is infected with a virus? Installed a piece of software that is hard to remove and now its clogging up your system? Don’t worry, VirtualBox, has what are called snapshots. Think of it as system restore. Before you make any big changes, shutdown your virtual machine and take a snapshot. You can always restore incase something goes wrong.
• Portable – If your running Linux, you can take your virtual machines and run them. As long as your destination computer has virtualbox installed, your good.

The only downside is, when your creating your virtual machine, your asked to allocate some of your system resources to the virtual machine. So, you if have 8GB of RAM, and you create a virtual machine with xUbuntu for 32 bit systems, for optimal performance, you’ll want to allocate 2GB of RAM to xUbuntu. If your host machine is low on system resources, then your virtual machine will be slow. Divide and administer accordingly. 

I want to put together a how-to document about Virtualbox and Linux for newcomers. Different flavors of Linux have to be treated differently when it comes to Virtualbox. For example, xUbuntu, you can’t just install VirtualBox guest additions and expect it to work. The reason is, xUbuntu is a stripped down version of Ubuntu, so the graphics support is missing. You have to install that first, then install the guest additions.