My new VM development environment

Yesterday I got tired of a development environment on the PC, so I decided to put a Linux machine with a full UI into a Virtual Box VM. I decided on Ubuntu 8.04 because a few things are still "complicated" on 9.

After 3 attempts (is my ISP at fault here?) I downloaded the Ubuntu ISO. I decided on 32 bit - can't see a reason to go 64 bit for this. I attached the ISO to a new Virtualbox with 1G RAM and 128G of HD, then ran the install, which went smothly.

I adjusted a few settings on Virtualbox - switched on processor support for virtualisation, 3d acceleration and nested paging. Then I ran the VM, and updated the package manager. Everything went very smoothly.

The only real complication is the resolution. Natively, the VM only offered 800*600 and 600*480. Not enough for Eclipse and a running window. I found I could get better resolution choices if I installed the Virtualbox Guest Additions. So I followed the instructions here but for some reason my copy of the Virtualbox Guest Additions had 2 different scripts for AMD and Intel, so I used the following process:

1. cd /media/cdrom/
2. sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
3. Waited for a few minutes and the restarted the Vm
4. Voila! The resolution in the VM now automagically adjusts to the size of my Virtualbox window.

I also added a shared folder so I could see my host directory from the guest. This is currently mounted with the following command:

• sudo mount.vboxsf share ~/share/

Todo: mount it automatically.

This was the basics I needed for the machine. Next step was to install the development tools I needed.