Running Linux VM under VirtualBox on your Windows Laptop

First I thought to title this page - How do I run Linux on my personal laptop ?  -:)

What I use ?

I run Fedora on Oracle VirtulBox . Oracle sates - "VirtualBox is the only professional virtualization solution that is freely available as Open Source Software". 

What You Need to Download ?

1. VirtualBox                                       : https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
2. Oracle VM VirtualBox Extention Pack   : Available on above url
3. Latest Fedora VirtualBox image          : http://virtualboxes.org/images
4. Fedora ISO image                             : http://mirrors.163.com/fedora/releases/

Installation of software and VM Creation

• Install VirtualBox  & Oracle VM VirtualBox Extention Pack - just follow on screen instruction
• Uncompress Fedora Virtualbox VM image using 7-Zip
• Open VirtualBox . Click Machine->Add - select uncompress Fedora Virtualbox VM image
• VM will be added

Configuring Virtual Machin

Configure vCPU

• Check your laptop processor - how many core it has ? For example my laptop have intel Core i5-2410M  CPU . It is Dual Core CPU. 
• Click on system on Fedora VM and change number of core to 2. Matching VM core with your laptop processor core is recommended to get most of CPU benefit at VM.

Configure VM RAM

• Set your CM RAM 2048 MB

Configure VM Network (vNIC)

• Select Bridged Adapter under Network Adapter 1

Now, Power on your VM. You will get GUI login prompt within a minute ! Try Fedora VM Credential  - (username/password): root/reverse and/or fedora/reverse

Other Issues

Keyboard

If keyboard mapping is not correct, change KEYTABLE and LAYOUT to "us" in below files and recreate grub.cfg

# vi /etc/sysconfig/keyboard

# vi /etc/sysconfig/grub

# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Hostname

Change hostname of your system in /etc/sysconfig/network

Mount ISO image

Go to Devices-> Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file And select Fedora-17-i686-Live-Desktop.iso image.

Network

If you router is configured for DHCP, dhcp will be configured for vNIC in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-p2p1. Run below command to check if IP is assigned, default route is pingable and your laptop IP is pingable.

# ifconfig -a

# netstat -nr (to find default route IP)

# ping <default route IP>

# ping <your laptop IP>

# ping google.com

Update Installed Packages

Since your Linux VM is already internet enabled, you will be able to access yum repository available  on internet. To check - upgrade bash package to latest release.
# yum clean all && yum upgrade bash

Stop Daemons You don't need

Stop Linux daemon you do not need for your day to day work to lower system resource usages.
# yum -y install system-config-services && system-config-services 

If all works fine, your are good to open your gmail in your Fedora Linux VM ! 

Reference

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Documentation
http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html

Credit

My friend Sanjay Kumar for waking up my mind