This is like having extra computer hardware laying around: it can’t do much without an operating system. VirtualBox gives you a way to host virtual machines. When complete, you should see the Extension Pack installed like this: vbox-extpack file downloaded in the previous step. Open VirtualBox, click the “VirtualBox” menu, then Preferences.

PLEASE NOTE: You’ll be prompted a few times for special permissions that are needed. dmg file to mount the installation image.ĭouble-click the icon to kick off the installer and just take all of the defaults: Next, in your Downloads folder double-click the. They upgrade VirtualBox all of the time, but here is a snapshot of what this looks like on the day of this writing, and what to click on: This has some extended functionality that is useful.

Extension Pack - click on “All supported platforms” to download a.

This is the main hypervisor software and user interface.

Platform Package - click on “OS X hosts” to download a.

From here, there are two things to download:.On macOS, you have a couple of choices, but for a few reasons, we’ll cover how to set up VirtualBox. There’s really two things you need here, a hypervisor of some sort, and some installation media for the operating system that you want to install. When you are done, you can delete it, install other operating systems, etc. Meaning, you could create a “virtual machine” on your main computer, and try out Ubuntu on that virtual machine, or VM. That is, a piece of software that can host a virtual computer, inside of your actual computer.

In modern day, pretty much any computer can host a hypervisor. What should you do?Įnter “virtualization”. But you don’t have an extra computer laying around to try it, and you certainly don’t want to replace your main computer with this experimental idea. Suppose you want to play around with Linux and maybe you’ve heard people talking about Ubuntu. If you attempt this on an M1 device, you’ll get an error during installation that only amd64 processors are supported. PLEASE NOTE: This only applies to older, non-M1 Apple hardware.

Download virtualbox m1