I'm sure this must have already been documented elsewhere, but -- having written about my experience running Windows 10 Tech Preview in a virtual environment the other day -- I thought I'd try a similar exercise installing Ubuntu on my old Windows 7 laptop, and document it for what it's worth. Here goes ...

 First off, I downloaded the necessary files to make this happen (from Oracle) and then went through the process of installing VirtualBox first. That done, I took the plunge and ran the Ubuntu executable (again, without backing up anything ... too lazy!)

VirtualBox had already made the Type and Version choices for me so I left those as they were and just typed in the name box for the virtual machine. I also stuck with the paltry 512MB RAM, as suggested and clicked Next, then chose to "Create a virtual hard drive now" from the next screen, and chose VDI as the hard drive type from the following screen. I followed these choices with the "Dynamically allocated" option, because I had a bit of free space available and, on the next screen I stuck with the default options. That was it. I just needed to click the green Start arrow and installing Ubuntu was just a few clicks away...

I pointed to the ISO location and VirtualBox launched it without a hitch. Ubuntu (or VirtualBox -- I don't know) appears to have some issue initializing my SMBus base address, but it breezed smoothly on, usin 0xaddr. I wasn't worried because, if anything went wrong I could always wipe the machine and start over.

 

I continued to stick to the default options, except where I was asked to make a choice (such as downloading updates, skipping languages, etc...) and Ubuntu was up and running.

 The whole process took little under an hour, unlike the 45 minutes it took yesterday with Windows 10 Tech Preview on my Apple MacBook. But this was definitely because of the low RAM I allocated. Also, as my laptop has a total of only 4GB RAM, I was quite happy to wait.

I must say I was quite impressed with the way Ubuntu has improved over the years (I last used it in 2008) and am now toying with the idea of making my laptop into a dual-boot machine. Let's see how far that thought takes me ...