I Want to Learn How to Build a Computer From Scratch, but I Have No Money. Now What?
Virtual Machines (Part 1)
Over in The Simple Path Towards Cybersecurity Expertise, I said that the first step towards cybersecurity expertise is learning how to build a computer from scratch.
Buying all the parts and literally building a new computer from scratch is a fantastic learning experience, if you’ve never done it before.
“But wait!”, you might say. “I don’t have a lot of money to spend on parts for a new computer.”
Don’t give up! If you have at least one computer, and you bought it within the past five years or so, you should be fine.
Instead, you can build a virtual machine, which is just a computer running inside of a computer.
And that’s exactly what we’re going to do here.
In order to build a virtual machine, you’re going to need some virtual machine software to run on your computer. Similar to how there are different kinds of web browsers, like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, there are different kinds of virtual machine software. For our purposes, we’re going to focus on Oracle VirtualBox — mainly because it’s free, it runs on Linux, Mac, & Windows, and it’s easy to use.
Head on over to https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads , and download & install the VirtualBox platform package that matches your operating system.
I happen to be on a Linux computer as I write this, and I have Virtual Version 6.1.6 r137129 (Qt5.6.1), after I download and install.
It looks like this:
If you’re playing along from home, hopefully you’re still with me at this point. Great job!
OK, so now we have the software that makes it possible to build and run a virtual machine. But we don’t have a virtual machine yet. To see how we’re going to actually build our virtual machine, you’ll have to stay tuned for Part 2 of this post.
