I was recently coerced into checking out what all the Ruby on Rails hype is about. In reading about Rails, it sounds like trying to get it to run with IIS is probably not the best idea. So I’ve taken the leap to setting up a virtual machine running Ubuntu 8.10 Server.

Being strictly a .NET developer for the last 8 years, I know practically nothing of the *NIX environment, LAMP stack or anything else that doesn’t come with Windows Update. So, everything here must be taken with a grain of salt, as I am well out of my comfort zone.

Sun xVM Virtual Box

Lacking a spare computer, I immediately stumbled across Sun’s FREE VirtualBox software at http://www.virtualbox.org/. Version 2.1.2 was released as of this post. I am running Vista Business as my host OS. The following screenshots are the steps I took to get my VirtualBox configured for Ubuntu.

Change the default directories

The default data directories in Vista are in C:\Users\YourProfile\.VirtualBox\… I generally don’t allocate a lot of extra room to my system partition, so I set the defaults to D:\VirtualBox\…

Create a “New” Virtual Machine

Update Virtual Machine Settings

There are a few settings that need to be changed on the Virtual Machine that you have just created. The following screenshots show PAE/NX being enabled, the Ubuntu ISO being mounted and changes to the type of network adapter.

Start your engines!

Last but not least, click “Start” to launch the Ubuntu install process on your new Virtual Machine.