It’s been a while since my last post on
symbian phone hacking but this time around, I’m bringing something different from mobile stuff. I’m posting a tutorial with detailed screenshots on how you can install, run and switch between multiple operating systems with a software called VirtualBox.
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64 / Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)
Why is virtualization useful?
Although I have dropped the full link for a complete user manual for this software below, I shall however brief you about why this software (VirtualBox) is particularly useful. The techniques and features that VirtualBox provides are useful for several scenarios:
* Running multiple operating systems simultaneously – VirtualBox allows you to run more
than one operating system at a time. This way, you can run software written for one
operating system on another (for example, Windows software on Linux or a Mac) without
having to reboot to use it. Since you can configure what kinds of “virtual” hardware should
be presented to each such operating system, you can install an old operating system such
as DOS or OS/2 even if your real computer’s hardware is no longer supported by that
operating system.
* Easier software installations — Software vendors can use virtual machines to ship entire
software configurations. For example, installing a complete mail server solution on a real
machine can be a tedious task. With VirtualBox, such a complex setup (then often called
an “appliance”) can be packed into a virtual machine. Installing and running a mail server
becomes as easy as importing such an appliance into VirtualBox.
* Testing and disaster recovery. Once installed, a virtual machine and its virtual hard disks
can be considered a “container” that can be arbitrarily frozen, woken up, copied, backed
up, and transported between hosts.
On top of that, with the use of another VirtualBox feature called “snapshots”, one can save
a particular state of a virtual machine and revert back to that state, if necessary. This way,
one can freely experiment with a computing environment. If something goes wrong (e.g.
after installing misbehaving software or infecting the guest with a virus), one can easily
switch back to a previous snapshot and avoid the need of frequent backups and restores.
Any number of snapshots can be created, allowing you to travel back and forward in virtual
machine time. You can delete snapshots while a VM is running to reclaim disk space.
* Infrastructure consolidation – Virtualization can significantly reduce hardware and electricity
costs. Most of the time, computers today only use a fraction of their potential power
and run with low average system loads. A lot of hardware resources as well as electricity
is thereby wasted. So, instead of running many such physical computers that are only partially
used, one can pack many virtual machines onto a few powerful hosts and balance the
loads between them.
What you need to get started
- You need a standard Computer with at least 1gb or ram and 40gb of hard disk although I will advice anybody to use 2GB RAM and anything above 40GB harddisk as the minimum requirements.
- The parent OS must have admin priviledges.
- You need the installation CD for the oerating system you wish to use in your virtual machine
Installation procedures
