The word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications of OpenOffice are all pre-installed with Ubuntu, along with calendar and email functions. You also have a full office suite installed on your virtual Linux machine. Think of this as the 'App Store' for Linux.

This is your portal to a large library of software, all of which you can download with a click or two. While I will leave the task of learning Ubuntu Linux up to you, one thing I will point out is the Add/Remove Software item under the Applications menu. You can read Ubuntu's built-in help files by clicking on the question mark icon in the menu bar. The user interface is somewhat different from that of Mac OS X, so you'll have to get used to it. Once the updates are done, it's time to play with your Ubuntu virtual machine. On my first-generation MacBook Air, this took about a half-hour and required a restart of the virtual machine at completion. It is recommended to simply click the Install Updates button, which will download and install those updates for you. Choose to Save the ISO file rather than Open or mount it.īy default, Ubuntu wants to download and install all software updates made since the distribution was first shipped. Choose a download host close to your geographical location from the pop-up menu, then click the Begin Download button to start transferring the file to your Mac. The download page should recognize that you're browsing from a Mac and offer the Intel Mac ISO image. You'll end up with a VirtualBox icon in your Applications folder. When the download is done, mount the disk image and follow the simple installation instructions.

Choose the link for Intel Macs (sorry, it doesn't run on those old PowerPC Macs), and click the download link. To get a free copy of Sun's excellent VirtualBox VM environment, point your browser to.

In this short how-to post, I'll demonstrate how I installed Ubuntu Linux 9.04, also known as 'Jaunty Jackalope.' While you can create a bootable partition on your Mac and boot Linux from it, I prefer to do things the lazy way. Why would you want to run Linux on a Mac? There are probably a few good reasons - learning about a different OS, using software that's not available on the Mac platform, or for a Linux class in school. Not only can you install Linux distributions on a Mac using VirtualBox, but it's extremely easy to do. How about Linux?,' which set up a challenge. The tweet asked, 'You did a post about installing Win 7 on the Mac for free. I received a private tweet from a reader the other day, who asked a question about a previous post in which I had installed Windows 7 RC1 on a Mac using Sun's VirtualBox.

Vm with ubuntu for mac