Installing a Virtual Machine - cogeorg/teaching GitHub Wiki

Software development can be easier using a Unix system than using Windows. Therefore, you may want to install a virtual machine and work in a Linux environment. All demonstrations in the tutorial will be done using a Unix distribution (Ubuntu or MacOS) so it is highly recommended to install a virtual box if you have a Windows computer. If you have a Mac, you will be fine.

Some computers are shipped with the virtualization feature turned off. In order to run a virtual machine, you want this to be turned on. The University of Berkley created a guide on how to enable this feature on various machines.

There are two main virtualization softwares, Oracle's VirtualBox and Microsoft's Hyper-V. Choose whatever whatever works better on your machine or what you prefer.

Downloading a linux image

You are free to use any linux distribution you would like, however, in case you have not used linux before, we suggest Ubuntu because some of the tutorials are going to be taught using this distribution. You can download Ubuntu 18.04 from here.

Installing and setting up VirtualBox

Navigate to https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and download it from there. You will also need the extension pack.

Once you have installed both (business as usual), open the Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager and click on New. Enter a name for you virtual machine, select Type Linux and the version of your downloaded distribution image. Click Next.

Increase the memory size too the maximum of the green area. Click Next. Use the default for all other settings. Once the new virtual box is set up, you can start it by clicking Start. It will prompt a window where you need to select an ISO image of the Linux distribution of your choice. Click the little file button on the right and find your downloaded linux image. Finally, walk through the installation process of your linux distribution.

Installing and setting up Hyper-V

Hyper-V requires Windows 10 and has been found to work better than VirtualBox. Their installation instructions are very detailed, so please refer to them for setting up a virtual machine using Hyper-V.