If you want to try out-Linux without damaging your existing system, using VirtualBox is the easiest way to go about it. VirtualBox emulates a virtual machine on your computer, and saves all system files of another operating system into a single file on the computer. So whatever you do inside the Linux system, does not really affect your Windows OS. VirtualBox can also be installed on Linux for running Windows, or on Windows for running OpenBSD.

First install Virtual Box. then start up. Click on new, and the Virtual Machine wizard starts up. You can run a number of virtual machines, all with different operating systems using now, we will use one distro.

The next step after starting up the software is to choose an Operating System and a Version. You can choose an Operating System and a Version . There is a long list of Linux distros. but the list is not exhaustive. If your distro is not listed. choose either the Linux kernel version number. or choose other. For this installation. we will be using OpenSUSE 11.1. but the method is the same for any other distro. Click on Next. In this step, you will allocate a certain portion of RAM to be used by VirtualBox. Most operating systems have a minimum of 256 MB. Some Linux distros can go to as low as 32 MB. However. if you have enough RAM, allocate generously. If you have over 2 GB of RAM, allocate half of what you have. For anything between 512 MB and 2 GB of RAM. three-fourths of what you have is a safe bet. Never max out the RAM allocation, as the virtual machine will be running on top of your Windows System.

The next step involves creating a virtual Hard Disk. For the operating system that you are going to install. this is all the memory that it has. Any Linux Distro will work on something as low as 8 or 10 GB for sure, many go far lower. Allocating more than 15 GB does not make sense if you are going to use virtual machine to run Linux, in which case a dual boot would be more appropriate.

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Choose "New" and select dynamically expanding storage. This means that although you have allocated 8 GB of space to the virtual Hard Drive. it will not actually use all the space on the system. The Virtual Hard Drive will occupy only as much space as necessary. and grow in size as and when you use Virtual Box to run the OS.

Go to the settings menu, and mount the CD Drive, USB drives and enable audio. This ensures that the Linux you will run is not a stripped down version and has access to many areas of the machine.

The next step, is to put the DVD/CD disk in the drive, and let the machine boot up. Fortunately, there is no BIOS setup involved, and any operating system is detected by default.

Continue installing the distribution as a Linux installation. Remember that SUSE in particular offers a range of desktop environments. If you prefer the lightweight XFCE over GNOME and KDE. or an older version of KDE. go to the "other" radio button while choosing a desktop environment.

That is it, now you can run Linux from a window in the Windows as. To switch between the virtual machine and the Windows desktop, use.the right control key (by default). To toggle the fullscreen mode, press the right control key and [F].