 As a Linux YouTuber, one of the things I do the most is deal with virtual machines, and I can't really say that before starting the channel I was ever much of a VM guy. I mostly did stuff just on regular hardware. So I didn't have a lot of experience using VirtualBox or anything similar to that prior to September of last year. It's hard to believe that the channel is well over a year old already. But the point is over the last year or so I've learned quite a few things about VirtualBox and several other ways of doing virtual machines that I thought could be helpful for those of you who haven't actually started on this journey yet. Now first, let's talk about why a virtual machine might be useful for a regular person because those of you who use virtual machines regularly, you already know why you use them and chances are you have a really good purpose for doing so. For those of you normies out there who are more like me at the beginning of the channel, for you using a virtual machine might be a good way of testing out a distro you're thinking of trying out like without having to wipe away your current install. Or it's also a good way of testing out software that you're not really interested in having on your hardware, things that might take up a lot of space or might take up a lot of resources and you just don't want having running all the time. So it's a good way of running Windows. If you decide you ever need to use Windows for a certain thing, so say for example you need to update the firmware on a stupid webcam you had just had to have and you don't want to have to go through and install Windows on a piece of hardware, you can do so in a virtual machine and then try to figure out how to update your firmware through the virtual machine instead of having to do it through the traditional ways, not that I would ever have done that, you know, from personal experience or anything, it's not I'm not talking from personal experience, not at all, no, never done that. Anyways, so there are reasons for normies to use virtual machines. So I thought what I do today is take you through five tricks and tips that I've learned over the last year that have helped me manage my virtual box virtual machines at least a little bit better. So let's go ahead and jump in. So the first one is that you can go through and double the amount of VRAM you have depending on where you set that setting. For some reason, there's an odd bug in virtual box that hasn't been fixed in a long time, or maybe they've done it on purpose. I don't actually know. So if you go through and create a new virtual machine, which I'll take you through the process of here real quick, just let's say we wanted to Fedora, I happen to know I have a Fedora ISO downloaded, and I'm going to give it eight gigabytes of RAM. And I'm going to go here through this and then choose this one here because we want to hard drive with it. And then we're going to give it, I don't know, 25 gigabytes of RAM or so. And then we're here now by default, if you go through and do all of your settings from here, like I always thought you had to when I first started out, I saw the big honking settings button, I just figured that's where you had to manage all your settings at. So I was going through and changing all the settings. If you start here in the display and you crank up your video memory up here, you only get 128 megabytes of RAM, like that doesn't seem like that much, right? But if we cancel out of this and go here and click on the RAM here and crank it all the way up, you get 256. So you can double the amount of VRAM your VM has access to by setting that setting here instead of in the settings panel. Why those two things aren't the same, I don't know. It's either a bug or they've done it specifically for a reason on which I couldn't fathom the reason why they do such a thing. But those two things for whatever reason, they are different. So I always set it here so you get double the amount of VRAM. So the second one on the list is that for the most part, if you want your distro to always display full screen right out of the box without having to change any settings, you kind of can't do that really. I mean, you have to either change the settings and then display settings of your distro that you're installing in your virtual machine, or you have to go through and install guest additions and then it will kind of do it automatically like you'd expect it to. However, if you change the graphics controller here on the front page from VM SVGA to VBOX SVGA and then OK, some distros will go ahead and display full screen on first boot. So that is preferred, I believe, for the most part. I just want to caution you, however, changing, basically changing this is changing the virtual, the display drivers and not all distros like that when you do that. So it can be buggy. So if you change this and go into a VM to start installing your Linux distribution or Windows or whatever and you end up with errors or things freeze or something, come back out here and change it to the default and then go back and try again because there's a good chance this will solve your problem. This does not, however, keep you from having to install guest additions. If you want things like bidirectional clipboards and stuff like that, those things still require the guest additions. But at least in this case, if you want full screen without having to mess with any settings in your distro out of the bat, this will go ahead and change that in most distros. Like I said, sometimes it causes problems. I've noticed specifically on Ubuntu for whatever reason, sometimes it causes problems in the installer and you have to kind of exit out and start back up again. Sometimes it doesn't. It's it's a weird thing. So that's number two. Number three on the list is something that kind of addresses a pet peeve of mine. So if you've listened to the channel for any amount of time, if you watch the channel for any amount of time, you'll know that I'm very protective of my home directory. I only want things in my home directory that I've placed there. And one of the things by default virtual box does when you create a new VM is it creates a virtual box folder in your home directory. It's the default and I don't like it there. It just it bothers me. It's a it's one of those things that just bothers me. So you can change that. So if you go up here to file and you go to preferences and then you you can change this thing here default machine folder. And as you can see, I've changed it from slash home, which is what it is by default slash home slash doctor M dub. And then it'd be virtual machines or whatever or virtual box. I've changed it to slash media slash VB, which is a which is a directory that I've created that way. It's not in my home directory anymore. And it doesn't bother me nearly as much because like I said, I got to choose that it's there where you know, where it's place. So that's an easy one. It's not necessarily something that's going to make you more efficient or anything like that. It's just going to save your home directory from unnecessary clutter. So you can change that there. If you change you can if you want when you go through and create a new one, you can go through and create a different directory for every single virtual machine that you create. If that is something that you really wanted to do, I don't know why you'd want to, but you can do that from here. So every time you create a new one, you just navigate to the folder or the directory that you want to use and then carry on with the setup of the VM. Like I said, why you'd want to go through and create a virtual machine directory for each and every virtual machine you have, I don't know why you'd want to do that. But theoretically, you could do so. OK, so that is number three. Number four is one that I just recently learned. For the longest time, I thought that you couldn't actually increase the hard drive size. So when you go through that little wizard there to create a new virtual machine, you go through and select the size of your hard drive. I always thought for the longest time, for the last year of my using virtual box, that when you set that size of hard drive, that was it. It was kind of set in stone. And if you didn't give it enough hard disk space, you kind of had to delete it and start over again. That's what I always thought. I didn't even bother looking up to see if that was actually the case. I just assumed that that was the way it was. But as usual with assumptions, I was wrong. So if you want to go through and change the size of your hard drive in your virtual machines, you can do so by going to File, Virtual Media Manager up in the File menu. By default, this down here doesn't, oops, that's not the button I wanted to select. By default, this down here does not show up. So you won't have this stuff down here. Actually, let me make sure that you can actually see this. Let me change the camera so that you can actually see. So again, by default, this down here does not show up. So you have to double click on the VM that you're wanting to change. And then you can mess around with a slider. And if you wanted to give it more, if you wanted to give it less or whatever, you can do so. And then you just hit Apply. I'm going to go ahead and cancel, because I don't really need to give that any more space. But one thing I will caution you on, and I've read this in a couple places, it's never happened to me. granted, like I said, I only found out about this a few weeks ago. But if you do change that amount, sometimes your VM can go wonky and you'll have to start over again. So just be careful. If you do have sensitive data on your VMs, to make sure you have a backup just in case, because you're messing around with the hard drive space. And if that thing, if it bugs out, which I've read that it can do, you might end up losing data. So just make sure that if you decide you need to expand your hard drive space, that you do have a backup before you go through and make that change. On that note, and this is an extra one that I didn't actually have on the list. But if you do decide you need to make changes to your virtual machine, or you want to test out software that might bork your system, what you want to do is right click on this and click clone. So if you clone this and it just hit next and then clone again, it will go through and create an exact copy of that virtual machine. Like I said, this wasn't on the list, but this is great for it. Let's say you were going to test a new kernel or something, if you were going to test something that messed with the base system of your Linux install, your Linux virtual machine, and you had the potential to mess around and bork your system. By creating a clone and doing all your testing in the clone, or either one, it doesn't really matter, just as long as you only mess up one, you can have full opportunity to mess up that particular virtual machine and not actually lose anything because you've created a clone. I've done this multiple times when I was going through and testing different window managers and stuff like that. When I was trying to learn how to build certain window managers that had to be compiled from source, when I wanted to go through and do that kind of stuff, if I messed up, I had the opportunity to go back without having to go through and delete a whole bunch of really weird files that were installed during the compilation process. So the cloning mechanism of a virtual box is really good. I use it all the time. OK, so the last tip on the list is to recycle your VMs to be lazy. So at a certain point, if you decide to become a VM junkie, you might see that you have just tons and tons of VMs here in a list and you have to scroll through them and all this stuff. There's no problem with that really. But if you're not using a virtual machine anymore, you can actually go through and recycle it. So let's just say I'm on this MX Linux one. I can go through, actually, let's say I'm on this MX Linux one. I can go through and change the distribution to, so let's just say Fedora. And then I can press OK. And then I can go through and find my Fedora ISO, which apparently I don't actually have a Fedora ISO. I thought I had one downloaded. It doesn't matter. You get the point. I'll just choose this forum on the next one, just for craps and giggles. I'm trying not to swear nearly as much. But anyways, just choose your ISO and then you go through and it will actually just install over the hard drive, just like you were going through and reinstalling on hardware. It's basically the exact same thing. Now I'm gonna actually do this, remove this because I don't want to get rid of that particular VM. But by recycling it, that means you don't have to have a, if you're just never going to use that VM anymore, don't create a new one. It saves you the time of having to go through all that setup again. Literally all you're going to do then is change the name, the operating system and add ISO. And that will save you from having to go through all the setup of VM again. So those are my tips and tricks for VirtualBox. I know that some of them are unusual, like the location things because really most people probably don't care about that. I care about it so I thought I'd include it. So that is it for this video. If you have any tips or tricks for VirtualBox, you can leave those in the comments section below. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Devon, Chris, East Coast Webgentuus, Funju, Patrick O, Primus, Sid A, Marcus, Megalyn, Jackson, Epitools, Steve A, Mitchell, Artson, and Emmeteus, Merrick, Camp Jachely, J-Dog, the BSDs Rock, and Peter A. Thanks to everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.