Vista in Ubuntu

I had Windows Vista Home Premium installed last night on my Ubuntu machine. I have 2GB RAM and 250GB of hardisk. Initially I wanted to install XP but turned out the only original DVD we have is Vista Home Premium, so be it! I've been wanting to try virtual machine for a long time already but then yesterday that very geek kernel hacker, Nur Hussein, triggered the apt-get move in me with a line "VirtualBox is so cool!".

What's VirtualBox? In layman terms, you can have multiple OS running at the same time on your pc without rebooting. Those of you who only know Windows all their life, yes there are alot of other alternative OS you can try, like Ubuntu. Hey install Ubuntu on your Windows using VirtualBox, that's possible too.

Installing another OS (guest OS) on your existing OS (host OS) will take space and consume memory. In my case, I have allocated 1GB of RAM and 40GB of space for Vista according to its recommended system requirement. So that's 40GB off of my 250GB and if I switch on Vista I have only 1GB left for Ubuntu, which is ok for me (it only takes 384MB of RAM for Ubuntu). So you have to plan your memory allocation carefully as you must allocate as much as you can to let the guest OS run properly but do not do it until your host OS is left with not enough for it to run either.

What do you need for virtual machine?
1. PC that can meet the minimum requirement
2. VirtualBox
3. Guest OS installation CD/DVD

Install VirtualBox
Add deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian karmic non-free in /etc/apt/sources.list then sudo apt-get update.

$ sudo apt-get install dkms
$ wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/sun_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-3.1

Install Vista on Ubuntu Karmic
1. Insert installation CD/DVD.
2. Follow instructions here. It's well documented!

And then finally.

[caption id="attachment_2141" align="aligncenter" width="602" caption="Windows Vista Home Premium on Ubuntu Karmic"]

[/caption]

I think 40GB of hardisk is abit overkill for me. And 2GB of RAM is kinda limiting for virtual machines. Well, despite all that, I'm going to have fun first and then think. That's the way to go in this crazy days. You'll never know when you're going to be hit with molokov cocktails....