One of the last things I usually want to do is take something that works and put it at risk. That’s always how I feel when I’m upgrading any of my Linux systems at home, putting the whole thing at risk. The result: an installation of Ubuntu 10.10 that is no longer supported. Even the old-releases repos don’t have the updates that I want anymore. Nevertheless, I felt it was time for a change.

In the past, this would have meant either removing the drive and replacing it with another, or rolling the dice and just installing over top of my old OS, hoping that I copied all of those files I wanted.

Some time ago I started using Virtualbox, a free download from Oracle. For anyone who is not familiar with Virtualbox and the like, it’s a virtual platform for installing other operating systems.  You take a chunk of your host hard drive (the physical disk in your computer) and create a “virtual disk drive” that you can use as the boot disk for your virtual installation.

Aside from having a variety of operating systems at my fingertips with just one physical system, it also lets me “try before I buy” new distributions, and see how things look and feel before I commit to upgrading my existing Linux system. So far I couldn’t be more pleased, because some of them were discarded, and it’s as easy as right click/Remove, and viola, it’s gone.  You have the option of keeping the VDI (Virtual Disk Image) around, but if I’m trashing a virtual machine, I doubt I’d want the disk image again, so I always opt to save the space.

I just downloaded the newest Ubuntu, 13.04, so I can test it out before I commit…. I’m not a huge fan of Gnome 3, but I’m willing to try it for a while, since I mostly use CLI with screen.