When writing about setting up PsychoPy in another post I couldn’t help but wanting to flush out how to quickly and as-easy-as-possibly setting up VirtualBox.
When and why would you want something called “VirtualBox” running on your laptop? When you want a playground where you can play with different operating systems and install craps with caution (see warning all the way at the end) inside these playgrounds and see what happens. Why? Because it’s fun, so let’s get to it.
Install Virtualbox. Just find the flavor for your system and install as you would with any other apps.
Download an .iso file of your preferred operating system. In our example, we are going for Ubuntu. Remember to come back for the rest of this tutorial after the minutes-long break while the 1.5GB image downloads.
Say hello to the world of possibilities and configurations. You have decisions to make.
Once you clicked the blue Reese’s-Peanut-Butter-Cups button you get to choose which operating system you want your image to be. Ubuntu in our case. Name it anything you like and browse around your options. I’m imaginative so I’m gonna name it “ubuntu”.
For memory size, I’d suggest at least 4GB or 4096MB as shown below. Anything lower than that you will see noticeable delay in response. But if you take any size approaching half of the system memory size (8GB for example, half of 16GB that my system has) for your image’s memory size, your host computer’s operations will be strained.
Next is the hard-drive size, 10GB is the default that VirtualBox will set up for you, but since hard-drive space is so abundant on today’s systems and the software sizes can be quite large, I usually double the size to 20GB. And if you know you are going to work with images etc that requires more storage space, knock yourself out sliding that slider.
After clicking that “Create” button, you will be set squarely with a ready-to-power-on image named (surprise) “ubuntu”.
Click the big green arrow which says “Start” to start.
Now we get to use the .iso image we so laboriously downloaded (only if you remember where it’s downloaded to).
After many gears turning and nail-bitings, voila!
Now you have two operating systems living on one machine!
To pause the Ubuntu instance just click on the close button (the first of the three dots at the very top).
Then you have the three options as shown below. Normally, you can just opt for “save the machine state” option, which means next time you start this image again, you will have everything exactly as you left off.
To “power off the machine”, meaning next time you start this image again, it will start fresh vs. the option above.
Don’t like image you made? Not sure what you just did? No problem, just remove the image by clicking on that option (right-click to see the list). Easy-peasy.
That’s it. Some warning though, just because VirtualBox provides some isolation of system resources, does not mean what you do inside the VirtualBox instance is guaranteed to be sandboxed. So exercise caution while doing your online business as a matter-of-course no matter where you are is advised.
Hope this is of some value to you.
