Installing VirtualBox is pretty easy, download the latest version of the application which is 2.2.0. It supports Windows XP, Linux 32bit/64bit, OS X, Solaris and OpenSolaris as the host operating system and then follow the on screen instructions to complete the installation. It’s pretty simple!

I used the OS X version of VirtualBox because my Mac was handy at the time. However, the screenshots are similar regardless of the operating system you have VirtualBox installed on.

The goal of this article is to show novice users a step by step installation of installing an Ubuntu Desktop inside of VirtualBox without having to mutli-boot their computer. I am going to assume you have VirtualBox installed and have either downloaded the Ubuntu ISO image or have an Ubuntu CDROM handy.

Image figures are at the bottom of the post.

Creating the Ubuntu virtual machine

• Open VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine and click the “New” Icon (Figure 1). A new wizard window will appear as shown in (Figure 2), click “next”.
• Enter the name of your new virtual machine perhaps “Ubuntu904Desktop” and then select “Linux” from the drop down Operating System menu, Ubuntu 32bit will highlight by default, click “Next” (Figure 3)
• Select the amount of RAM you wish to dedicated to your Ubuntu Desktop, the default is 256MB however, 512MB would give you better performance if you have the available RAM, click “Next“. (Figure 4)
• Next, you will be presented with the option to create a new hard disk or use an existing hard disk, select create a new hard disk (Figure 5). Click the “Next” button and another window will appear (Figure 6), click “Next“, you are presented with an option to for “Dynamic” or “Fixed” storage. Dynamic storage will grow the virtual disk as you require more space (saving space on the hard drive) whereas Fixed storage will pre-allocate the space. I’ve selected “Dyanmic” for this installation (Figure 7), click “Next“.
• Enter the name of the virtual machine and select the amount of space you wish to give your Ubuntu Dekstop, I’ve opted to use the default of 8GB. (Figure 8, Figure 9) Click, “Next” and finally “Finish” to complete the creation of the virtual disk for the Ubuntu Desktop.
• You will be dropped back to the virtual disk screen and  you will notice the new virtual disk, click “Next” to continue. (Figure 10)
• Finally, the last screen will give you a general overview of the virtual machine, click “Finish” to complete. (Figure 11)

Installing Ubuntu

• Now that the virtual machine template has been created we can begin the installation of Ubuntu. The first thing we need to do is attach the Ubuntu ISO image or CDROM to our virtual machine. Click the CD/DVD-ROM link, its blue,  a new window will appear as shown in (Figure 12).
• Check the “Mount CD/DVD” button and then select either “Host CD/DVD” if you have the CDROM or “ISO Image file” if you have the ISO image. I’ve used the ISO image in this example, click “Ok” to complete. (Figure 13, Figure 14)
• Select the virtual machine from the left menu in VirtualBox and click the green start arrow to turn on your virtual machine.
• NOTE: Once you click in the virtual machine window your keyboard and mouse are locked in.
• Your virtual machine will now restart and the Ubuntu installation will begin (Figure 15), select the appropriate language and press “enter“.
• Next, you will be presented with a menu (Figure 16) using the arrow keys select the “Install Ubuntu” option and press “enter“. Installation will begin as shown in (Figures 17). Once the installer has loaded a new window will be presented starting the actual installation (Figure 18) the language you selected in the previous screen should already be highlighted. Click “Forward“.
• On the next screen select your timezone and click “Forward” (Figure 19), select your keyboard language layout (Figure 20), click “Forward“.
• Next, you are presented with the disk partitioner. We are going to use the defaults here which is “Use the entire disk“, click “Forward” to continue the installation.(Figure 21)
• Next, you will be presented with a series of questions pertaining to setup of your user account. Fill in the fields with the acceptable information and click “Forward“. (Figure 22)
• At this point installation is ready to begin, look over the proposed settings and click “Install” when you are ready. This will take a few minutes to complete. (Figure 23)
• Figure 24 and 25 is an example of what you can expect along the way during installation.
• When the installation is completed you will be prompted with a windows requiring you to restart the computer. (Figure 26) Things got kind of weird at this point, since the CDROM is attached to the virtual machine un-mounting it by going to the “Devices > Unmount CD/DVD-ROM” would do no good since the virtual machine would reboot off the CDROM again. I couldn’t find a decent way to remove the CDROM from the virtual machine unless I powered it off. So, hit enter to restart the virtual machine and then power it off by click the “X” on the window. You will be presented with three options select “Power off the machine” and click “Ok“.
• Select the virtual machine and click the green “start” button again.
• Once your machine has rebooted you will be prompted with a login screen as shown in (Figure 27, 28) enter the username and password you specified during installation to log into Ubuntu. You will now see your desktop (Figure 29).

Installing the guest additions

• Now, that our Ubuntu operating system is installed we need to install the “Guest Additions” these are similar to the VMware Tools that VMware provides.
• From the VirtualBox menu select “Devices > Install Guest Additions” a CDROM will appear on your desktop and give you a warning just click “Cancel” it’s trying to auto-run as if it was in Windows. Navigate to “Applications > Accessories > Terminal“.
• Enter the following command to switch to the CDROM directory “cd /cdrom“. Invoke the installer by running the following command “sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run” if you have a 32bit platform or “sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-amd64.run” if you have a 64bit platform.
• Once the Guest Additions are installed, reboot and you will be presented with a window telling you the benefits of them. Click “Ok” to dismiss the window.

Enjoy Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope!

A quick excerpt from his website..

At just 5.25 x 8 inches and 164 pages, Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is a compact yet comprehensive guide to everyday Ubuntu use.

It’s ideal for those who need vital information on all aspects of using Ubuntu, but who don’t have time to wade through thick documentation.

Each chapter of Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference tackles an aspect of Ubuntu.

First, you learn about installation—getting Ubuntu onto your computer—after which you learn how to configure your computer’s hardware.

Following this, you’re introduced to the Ubuntu desktop, and the tricks and techniques of efficient day-to-day usage. The book then describes the highways of the Ubuntu filesystem, and gives a full run-down of Ubuntu’s file manager.

Next, the command-line is tackled in-depth, after which software management is explained. Finally, system security is described—configuring the firewall, installing antivirus, and encrypting sensitive data. Appendixes provide a glossary of terms, and a guide to understanding technical documentation.

Written for anybody switching to Ubuntu, particularly former Windows users, Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference assumes zero Linux knowledge. It provides the wisdom of the expert user and concisely conveys core competencies.

On Sunday evening around 11:30pm EST the forums were down again but this time with table corruption on our largest tables which is our post table (it has around 6.5 million rows) and the thread table (over 1 million rows). I’m assuming everything “wasn’t” ok, after the crash on Thursday even though the checks said they were. Monday was spent cleaning up the tables, fixing corruption issues etc. Unfortunately, because of the massive size of our tables a check and repair takes upwards of 4-5 hours per check and repair until the issues were mostly resolved, this had to be completed a few times. We’ll be monitoring the data integrity over the next couple days to ensure everything stays consistent.

When the forums were ready to come online last night around 7pm EST, we ran into issues with the amount of traffic the site was getting (benefits of being popular eh?). To help ease the pressure on our main database server we have utilized the “slave” feature in vbulletin which will send queries to a slave server to help reduce load on the master. So far this has been working pretty well except for a few hiccups which were easily corrected by changing mySQL variables.

James Troup from Canonical was a great help making sure the proxies were stable last night and will be getting us additional hardware to help with our explosive growth as we have outgrown our current servers. James, thank you for your help, it is appreciated.

Until things stable out we have disabled a couple of popular features on the forums namely the “Thank you” and the “Solved Post” features. We hope to re-enable them again soon. I expect we’ll have a some rough patches ahead of us until the new hardware is in place and we look forward to getting things more stable in the near future. We’ll also be implementing a better method of communication to our users when the forums are offline, expect an announcement on the forums in the near future about that. We appreciate everyones patience during this time.

Ubuntu-geek

I also posted this on the forums here.

Installing VirtualBox is pretty easy, download the application which supports Windows XP, Linux 32bit/64bit, OS X, Solaris and OpenSolaris as the host operating system and then follow the on screen instructions to complete the installation.

In this article I’ve used the OS X version of VirtualBox because my Mac was handy at the time. However, the screenshots are similar regardless of the operating system you have VirtualBox installed on.

The goal of this article is to show novice users a step by step installation of installing an Ubuntu Desktop inside of VirtualBox without having to mutli-boot their computer. I am going to assume you have VirtualBox installed and have either downloaded the Ubuntu ISO image or have an Ubuntu CDROM handy.

Creating the Ubuntu virtual machine

• Open VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine and click the “New” Icon. A new wizard window will appear as shown in (Figure 1), click “next”.
• Enter the name of your new virtual machine perhaps “Ubuntu810Desktop” and then select “Linux” from the drop down Operating System menu, Ubuntu 32bit will highlight by default, click “Next” (Figure 2)
• Select the amount of RAM you wish to dedicated to your Ubuntu Desktop, the default is 256MB however, 512MB would give you better performance if you have the available RAM, click “Next“. (Figure 3)
• Next, you will be presented with the option to create a new virtual Disk. Click the “New” button and another window will appear (Figure 4), click “Next“, you are presented with an option to for “Dynamic” or “Fixed” storage. Dynamic storage will grow the virtual disk as you require more space (saving space on the hard drive) whereas Fixed storage will pre-allocate the space. I’ve selected “Dyanmic” for this installation (Figure 5), click “Next“.
• Enter the name of the virtual machine and select the amount of space you wish to give your Ubuntu Dekstop, I’ve opted to use the default of 8GB. (Figure 6, Figure 7) Click, “Next” and finally “Finish” to complete the creation of the virtual disk for the Ubuntu Desktop.
• You will be dropped back to the virtual disk screen and  you will notice the new virtual disk, click “Next” to continue. (Figure 8 )
• Finally, the last screen will give you a general overview of the virtual machine, click “Finish” to complete. (Figure 9 )

Installing Ubuntu

• Now that the virtual machine template has been created we can begin the installation of Ubuntu. The first thing we need to do is attach the Ubuntu ISO image or CDROM to our virtual machine. Click the CD/DVD-ROM link, its blue (Figure 10 ) a new window will appear as shown in (Figure 11).
• Check the “Mount CD/DVD” button and then select either “Host CD/DVD” if you have the CDROM or “ISO Image file” if you have the ISO image. I’ve used the ISO image in this example, click “Ok” to complete. (Figure 11, Figure 12)
• Select the virtual machine from the left menu in VirtualBox and click the green start arrow to turn on your virtual machine. You will be presented with a new window and a warning (Figure 13) click “Ok” to dismiss this.
• NOTE: Once you click in the virtual machine window your keyboard and mouse are locked in.
• Your virtual machine will now restart and the Ubuntu installation will begin (Figure 14), select the appropriate language and press “enter“. You will be presented with another window telling you how to exit the screen (Figure 14a), click “Ok“
• Next, you will be presented with a menu (Figure 15) using the arrow keys select the “Install Ubuntu” option and press “enter“. Installation will begin as shown in (Figures 16). Once the installer has loaded a new window will be presented starting the actual installation (Figure 17 ) the language you selected in the previous screen should already be highlighted. Click “Forward“.  
• On the next screen select your timezone and click “Forward” (Figure 18), select your keyboard language layout (Figure 19), click “Forward“.
• Next, you are presented with the disk partitioner. We are going to use the defaults here which is “Guided – use entire disk“, click “Forward” to continue the installation.(Figure 20)
• Next, you will be presented with a series of questions pertaining to setup of your user account. Fill in the fields with the acceptable information and click “Forward“. (Figure 21)
• At this point installation is ready to begin, look over the proposed settings and click “Install” when you are ready. This will take a few minutes to complete. (Figure 22)
• Figure 23 is an example of what you can expect along the way during installation.
• When the installation is completed you will be prompted with a windows requiring you to restart the computer. (Figure 24) Things got kind of weird at this point, since the CDROM is attached to the virtual machine un-mounting it by going to the “Devices > Unmount CD/DVD-ROM” would do no good since the virtual machine would reboot off the CDROM again. I couldn’t find a decent way to remove the CDROM from the virtual machine unless I powered it off. So, hit enter to restart the virtual machine and then power it off by click the “X” on the window. You will be presented with three options select “Power off the machine” and click “Ok“.
• Select the virtual machine and click the green “start” button again.
• Once your machine has rebooted you will be prompted with a login screen as shown in (Figure 26) enter the username and password you specified during installation to log into Ubuntu. You will now see your desktop (Figure 27).

Installing the guest additions

• Now, that our Ubuntu operating system is installed we need to install the “Guest Additions” these are similar to the VMware Tools that VMware provides.
• From the VirtualBox menu select “Devices > Install Guest Additions” a CDROM will appear on your desktop and give you a warning just click “Cancel” it’s trying to auto-run as if it was in Windows. Navigate to “Applications > Accessories > Terminal“.  
• Enter the following command to switch to the CDROM directory “cd /cdrom“. Invoke the installer by running the following command “sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run” if you have a 32bit platform or “sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-amd64.run” if you have a 64bit platform. (Figure 28)
• Once the Guest Additions are installed, reboot and you will be presented with a window telling you the benefits of them. Click “Ok” to dismiss the window. (Figure 29)

Enjoy Ubuntu.

Edit: Andreas pointed out in a comment below of an issue with keyboard layouts using Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows XP SP3. You can find more information here.

Thanks again to everyone helped test and find bugs after the upgrade.

The book is written well, its easy to understand and generally flows very well. The author did a great job explaining how to compile and install CUPS, configure CUPS, check printer status and configuring user access. These are just a few tidbits of information the book touches on.

If you are working with or plan to work with CUPS in the future I highly suggest checking this book out.

I’ve attached a sample of Chapter 4 with permission of the publisher so you can get an idea of how well the book is laid out.

Download Sample: Chapter 4 Managing multiple printers at a time

I also want to say thanks to the dedicated staff and the community who make the Ubuntu Forums what they are.

A little history of the forums from it’s first launch and today…

Make sure your system is updated:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

Install nginx and PHP5, we’ll be installing the cgi version of php.

sudo aptitude install nginx php5-cgi

Download the following php-fastcgi startup script and save it to /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi. Nginx will use php in cgi-mode which is why we are creating a init file for it. (note: I found this init script on a mailing list someplace)

Download: php-fastcgi init script

Next, run the following commands on the php-fastcgi script.

sudo chmod u+x /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi
sudo chown 0.0 /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi
sudo update-rc.d php-fastcgi defaults 21 23

Now, go ahead and create your directory that will store your website. For example you might do the following:

mkdir -p /home/username/domains/yourdomaincom/{public_html,log,cgi-bin}

Modify the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file and set the following variable. I have mine set to 15MB but if you wish to allow larger files to be uploaded over http set this accordingly.

client_max_body_size 15m;

Finally, lets setup a virtual domain. Navigate to the /etc/nginx/sites-available directory and create a file called yourdomain.com (replace with your domain) and use the following as a template. Make sure to replace your paths etc.

[sourcecode language='css']server {
listen 80;
server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;

access_log /home/username/domains/yourdomain.com/log/access.log;

location / {
root /home/username/domains/yourdomain.com/public_html;
index index.html index.htm index.php;
}

# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
#
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/username/domains/yourdomain.com/public_html$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}[/sourcecode]

Like apache, nginx has a sites-available and sites-enabled folder this allows for better control of active/disabled virtual domains. Navigate to the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled folder and create a symlink back to your virtual host’s configuration.

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ && sudo ln -s ../sites-available/yourdomain.com

Finally, lets start everything up.
/etc/init.d/php-fastcgi start
/etc/init.d/nginx start

At this point you should be able to browse to your site using your domain name. You can easily duplicate multiple domains by creating new virtual host files and creating the sym link as noted above, remember that ngix will need to be restarted.