This will make nifty things like easy resizing and copy/paste to/from the VM work well and mostly seamlessly. You will also want to install the VMWare (or Virutal Box) tools on on the VM.

The choices are fairly simple for VMWare, and straight forward. Once you have the VM software installed, you can create a new VM, and specify the ISO of Ubuntu or other Linux distribution to install on the VM. I’m keeping the instructions general so whatever software you have available can be used. You can download VMWare Workstation Player here:

You may need it to do anything more advanced than that or to share VMs. You do not need a paid version of the VM software simply to create VMs for your own use.

I used to use Oracle Virtual Box, but recently switched to VMWare Workstation Player, and am enjoying it a lot. You can use your favorite (free or not) VM software to create a new VM. This version comes with all the desktop stuff, but honestly, being able to run a web browser can be useful from time to time on a sandbox. The instructions are going to vary here depending on your distribution. Building a new VM can be frustrating – patience, troubleshooting, and perseverance are all called for. You’re likely to have to Google errors and try again. The first thing to know about building a VM is that you’re a user doing admin-level tasks with one or more pieces of software. More robustness is required for any other kind of environment. These instructions should never be used to build a development, test, qa, or any other environment.

Even if I didn’t use it constantly for blogging, I would still need it for trying things to see how they work before advising clients. There are plenty of things that I want to try in a sandbox VM before I let them anywhere near even a development environment.

Vm sandbox