Installing Ubuntu on VirtualBox

I have a Windows 8 machine on which I will be installing Ubuntu 14.04 inside Oracle VM VirtualBox. First download VirtualBox and install it. For this example I am using 4.3.12. Download the image file for Ubuntu.

Once you have installed VirtualBox open it and click on "New" on the toolbar to begin the process of creating a new virtual machine.

Give a name to your virtual machine and select which OS you would be installing in it and click on "Next".

Select the amount of RAM you would like to allocate to the virtual machine. It cannot be greater than the RAM on your physical machine. Have a look at this discussion if you are unsure on how memory should you allocate to your virtual machine.

Select whether you want to create virtual hard drive or not. I generally create a virtual hard drive for each of my virtual machines.

Select the hard drive file type as "VDI".

Select how you would like to store data on your physical hard drive - dynamically or fixed size defined at the beginning. I select "Fixed size" allocating 40 GB to virtual machine's hard drive.

This would create a VDI (Virtual Disk Image) file of 40 GB on your file system. It can take a couple of minutes to complete this process.

Once the process is complete your virtual machine would show up in VirtualBox.

Select your newly created VM and click on "Settings". Go to "Storage" tab and define the Controller IDE as the Ubuntu image file you downloaded.

Now start you virtual machine by clicking on "Start" on your toolbar and this would begin the process of installing Ubuntu on your virtual machine.