To be able to develop and test on such a VM I generally require it to be available as if it is on the network (per example via SSH, or my browser). Assuming that you have installed VirtualBox and that you know how to setup a VM already, I’ll briefly explain the specifics of setting up a VM that you can access as if it were on the network:

• When creating the VM give it two network adapters.
  • Adapter 1 setup as “NAT”, this gives the VM access to whatever network your computer is connected. This includes the internet if you’re connected to it, which can be useful to download OS updates or applications inside your VM (I often have VMs running Ubuntu, and the NAT adapter allows me to use apt painlessly).
  • Adapter 2 setup as “VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter”. This gives the VM an IP address within a private range, that only exists within your own computer.

When installing an OS on your VM, it is useful to give the it a static IP address for adapter 2. Having a static IP for each VM will allow you to connect to it using bookmarks instead of having to check what the IP of each VM is after it has started. Note that you do have to adhere to the IP range defined in the VirtualBox preferences for the host only adapter. You can find this information via the menu: go to “File” -> “Preferences”, go to the “Network” section and double-click on the host only adapter entry to get a popup where you can see/configure the network range and the DHCP server settings (you probably want to ensure that your static IPs cannot be given out by the host only adapter’s DHCP server).

When Fedora 12 was released I decided to give that a go. I have to say that like Ubuntu it is easy to install and works really well. Unfortunately though I noticed that I could install packages without root priviliges as written here: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/11/18/2039229/Fedora-12-Lets-Users-Install-Signed-Packages-Sans-Root-Privileges. To me that is just an unacceptable security risk. I realise that this is just a policy setting (that you can re-configure), but I’m just not too fond of these types of defaults…

So I decided to back to Ubuntu. Unfortunately installing the 9.10 release did not go without problems, mainly because I had used some old CD-R(W) discs. Once I had a good CD-RW disc installation was a breeze though. A friend told me that next time I should use a USB drive instead

Because I’m so happy with Ubuntu 9.10, I also installed it on my EEE PC 900… using a USB drive