Installing Jaunty UNR in VirtualBox

Sometimes it's useful to be able to run Ubuntu as a virtual machine inside VirtualBox for testing and debugging purposes. The problem with the basic version of VirtualBox is that it does not support installing from USB, which is a problem when faced with installing from USB images, such as Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR). To get around this, install UNR as follows:

If you've not already installed VirtualBox, you can install it using:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose

Convert the USB bootable image into a bootable VirtualBox VDI image:

VBoxManage convertfromraw ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-bootable-i386.vdi

Create an 8GB empty disc image to install this into:

VBoxManage createhd -filename ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.vdi -size 8192 -register

Create a new VM using the ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-bootable-i386.vdi (at the Virtual Hard Disk dialogue box, select "Existing" and browse the filesystem to select the .vdi file). Once you have created the VM, add the ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.vdi as a IDE primary slave drive. Then boot and install UNR to the IDE primary slave.

After the installation is complete remove the ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-bootable-i386.vdi
primary drive from your virtual machine and set ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.vdi to be the primary IDE drive.

OK, so it's a little bit of messing around, but it does the trick.

Jaunty UNR installed in VirtualBox