Knowledge Is Everything

Great news for those who want to try out the latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal with the Unity interface without booting a CD or Live USB – Unity now works in the latest VirtualBox 4.0. All you have to do to get Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity to work in VirtualBox 4.0 is to enable 3D Acceleration and obviously, install the VirtualBox Guest Additions. Read on!

Get Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity working in VirtualBox 4.0

1. Firstly, install VirtualBox 4.0.x.

2. Download the latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal daily live ISO from here.

3. In VirtualBox, create a new virtual machine, go to its settings and on the Display tab, check the “Enable 3D Acceleration” box.

4. Now you’ll need to install Natty in VirtualBox. When done, start it and proceed to step 5.

5. Install the VirtualBox Guest Additions in Natty: open a terminal (in Ubuntu Natty that runs in VirtualBox) and type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-utils

When done, restart the virtual machine and Ubuntu 11.04 with the Unity interface should be working!

Extra tip: if Unity defaults to a classic “windows 95-ish” theme when it starts, run the following command to get the default theme back

killall -9 gnome-settings-daemon && gnome-settings-daemon