(Optional: If your purpose for setting up this machine is to practice installing Ubuntu on a RAID array in a safe sandboxed environment, set up additional virtual hard drive images now under Settings > Storage).

Hit the 'Next' or 'Create' button a few times (2048 MB RAM, keep the default 10 GB hard drive file - you can make these bigger or smaller later), until you see an icon for your virtual machine in the left sidebar of the Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager.

The default is 1024 MB RAM - bump this up to at least 2048 MB RAM for Ubuntu 17.10 or later.

Remember, this is the guest operating system running inside the virtual machine, not your host operating system). (Many people give woefully uncreative names like 'testUbuntu20')

Start the Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager.

Don't wait until it is done, which may take a few minutes - continue with the following while it's downloading. For example, you may want to try Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 LTS.

Go to, hit the 'download' link, and pick whichever version of Ubuntu you want to try out in a virtual machine.

Other versions and other hosts should work similarly.) (This was tested installing Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 LTS as a guest in VirtualBox-6.1 on a Windows 10 host. Setting up an Ubuntu virtual machine is easy. It doesn't matter if your host OS is Linux, MacOS, or something else. Once you have VirtualBox installed on your host computer.

6 Using ssh to access an Ubuntu virtual machine.

5 A few things you can do with this virtual machine.

3 return to the host operating system for further installation steps.

2 installing inside the virtual machine.

1 host operating system pre-install steps.

Virtualbox install ubuntu server