As a beginner, you might be unfamiliar with the “open-source” term. If you wanted to use Windows instead, you’d have to pay for it. Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux operating systems because it’s free and open-source (benefits of Ubuntu are thoroughly explained in this article).

For this tutorial, you will be using Linux as your operating system with Ubuntu(64-bit). Next, you will chose an operating system. Eventually, you will end up with the VirtualBox home screen looking something like this (ignore the machine displayed on the left and the backups on the right, you will get to these eventually): When installing, use the prompted default settings. After you click the link, follow the instructions for the download and installation process.

To begin, you are going to download Virtual Box on your computer. When you’re done, you will have a working VM ready for your programming endeavors! Downloading and Configuring VirtualBox Next, I will show you how to install Ubuntu 18.04 and how to download the Guest Additions package. In this tutorial, I will show you how to download and install VirtualBox, as well as how to create a virtual machine. With a virtual machine, you are able to run anything on it without endangering your host machine. As a beginner, the risk is higher because you will be looking at tutorials online without knowing if they’re trustworthy. However, when you run anything on your computer, you’re always at risk of things not going as expected. You might be asking yourself why you need this because you can run and write all your code in your current computer. Setting up a virtual environment is an extremely helpful and important step to becoming a developer.

How to use virtualbox to code