Tag Archives: VirtualBox
Installing VirtualBox and Windows 10 on a Mac
Instructional video time!
I have created a video that walks you through the process of setting up Oracle’s VirtualBox hypervisor on a Mac, and using it to run Windows 10. In a window. On your Mac.
It sounds complicated, but it’s not. I explain it all in the video, however a hypervisor simply allows you to set up logical machines, each of which can run an operating system and act as a separate PC! You can have a machine running Windows, a machine running Linux, and even multiple machines each running a version of an OS (On my Mac, I have a machine running Windows 10, a machine running Windows 7, and a machine running Linux Mint, as you will see).
You can use VirtualBox on any OS, so you don’t have to use it just on a Mac. If you’ve always wanted to experiment with Linux and find out what the deal is, you can set up a VM and have at it! It’s insanely useful, not terribly difficult to set up, and free, so I encourage you to give it a try.
Links shown in video:
VirtualBox and extensions: https://www.virtualbox.org/
Download Windows 10: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
Virtual Machines and My Time With Windows 10 (image heavy!)
As we all know, especially if you read the Windows 10 reveal post on this very blog, Microsoft recently announced that Windows 9 was going to be Windows 10. They skipped a whole number for various theorized reasons, but response to the new OS has been cautiously optimistic. This was helped by Microsoft’s standard practice of releasing an early build that people could download, install, and play with if they were so inclined.
It’s not an alpha release, in which the software is very early, very unstable, and only tested by people inside the company, it’s more closely related to a beta, which is a later, more refined but still buggy pre-release version tested by the public or outside testers/focus groups. Rather than call it either of those however, it’s what Microsoft labels a ‘Technical Preview,’ a current, non-optimized and incomplete yet generally functional version of the still-one-year-away Windows 10. It may have bugs, it may crash, it may behave erratically or unexpectedly, it may even destroy all your data, but you agree to take on that risk if you decide to download it and give it a try.
So of course I downloaded it!
But I’m aware of the risk, and I would never install it on a machine I actually use. Well, not quite anyway. I use what’s known as a ‘Virtual Machine,’ which is a simulation of dedicated hardware on other dedicated hardware. To put it more clearly, I installed it in its own little corner of my Mac.
