This allows the installation and execution of a Guest OS simultaneously with the Host OS.
Installation of a Linux Guest is easy. However, this only gives a screen resolution of 1024x800 for the Guest. To increase it, you need to update the Linux kernel and install VirtualBox Guest additions. Full instructions can be found here.
Also worth noting is that if you want to ssh into the Guest from the host, using NAT it is necessary to set up port forwarding (see VirtualBox User Manual section 6.3.1). Once this is done, it is necessary to ensure ssh is running on the Guest, and ssh in with the correct port, e.g. using Xming:
plink.exe -l user -p 2222 localhost
Finally, it is good to set up folder sharing so you can access all the files on the Host. This is explained in section 4.3 of the User Manual, and you just have to make sure that the user is in the vboxfs group using:
usermod -a -G vboxfs user
And that should give a full screen Guest OS with access to the Host directories wherever necessary without the overhead of maintaining either separate hardware, or a dual boot system. Brilliant!
