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Installing the Guest Operating System

VirtualBox creates “guest” machines that run on top of a “host” machine. The host machine is the machine running VirtualBox. It “hosts” various virtual machines running as “guests” inside of VirtualBox. Once you define a virtual machine, you install an operating system, much like you would if you were installing a real operating system on your computer. Let’s install Ubuntu on this machine using the disk image you downloaded.

When you first start your virtual machine, VirtualBox detects that there’s no operating system and prompts you to install one. To start the machine, select your Ubuntu virtual machine from the list of machines and press the green Start button at the top of the VirtualBox interface. ...