Setting up Virtual Machine for Linux

This is a generic article for setting up the virtual machine for installation of any Linux distribution in Virtual Box. The tutorial will help you to assign memory, create a virtual hard drive, enabling your system for 64-bit OS and more. 

The first step is to grab a installation copy from Virtual Box website. Here's the link : virtualbox download. The download options will include Virtual box for Windows host, OS X host and Linux / Solaris hosts. 

Once you are done with the download and installation part which is pretty simple, the next step includes setting up the Virtual Box to run a Linux distribution. The steps are common for any distro and repetitive too. 

Before you set up the virtual machine, if you need to run a 64-bit distribution, you will need to enable the Virtualization Technology. To do so, restart your system and press the key to enter the BIOS setting (for my HP Pavilion dv6, pressing Escape key is sufficient. It may be F8 or F12 too). Once done you will find a screen similar to this.

Select BIOS Setup and under Virtualization Technology, select Enable. Save and restart your PC. The blank screen while booting up a Linux screen can also be solved by enabling this feature. 

Now coming back to setting up virtual machine for Linux, Fedora in this case, open the Virtual Box, and click on New.

The next window will ask you for the Name, Type and Version of the OS. I have typed Fedora in the Name section and the next two are determined by the VM itself. You can change it though. 

Click on next. The step will ask for the amount of RAM you want to allocate to the virtual machine. Anything above 1GB will be fine here. 

Click on Next. The next two windows will ask for the virtual disk settings. Select "Create a virtual hard disk now".

In the hard disk file type, leave it to the default option - VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image).

Under storage on physical hard disk, you can select dynamically allocated or fixed size. 

The next step is to choose the file location and size of the storage you want to allocate to the Virtual Machine. 

This was the initial set up of the Virtual Box. The next step is to link the downloaded Fedora 24 ISO to this machine. In the screenshot below, you can see the settings. Click on the storage, and click on the icon as shown. Select choose virtual optical disk file and select the ISO you have downloaded. Click on ok and finish. 

In this way, you have set up the virtual box for any Linux distribution and linked the ISO file to this virtual box. Next step is Installing Fedora 24 in Virtual Box. You can return to the Complete Installation Guide for Fedora 24 for other options.