Installing Ubuntu Linux on a Hyper-V Virtual Machine

One of the nice things about Linux is how it doesn't need a ton of resources to run.  If you don't believe me, just ask someone who likes Linux.  They'll go on and on about this and a whole other laundry list of reasons why Linux is superior in every way.

They're almost as bad as Mac users.

Anyway, I need a router in a virtual lab environment, so I decided to create a VM with an Ubuntu Linux for this purpose.

Creating the Router Virtual Machine

I created a very basic virtual machine using the following settings:

• 2GB RAM, using Dynamic Memory
• Connection to the Private virtual switch
• 80GB HDD

I’ve documented the VM creation in a different post.

Installing Ubuntu Linux

The first step here is to get the latest distro.  Generally speaking, I tend to go with the most stable release rather than the latest and greatest.  I downloaded the LTS version and at the time of this posting, the version was 16.04.3.

I’ll give you a screen-by-screen walkthrough of the installation, but it’s pretty simple.

Connect to your VM and mount the installation media as a DVD drive:

Start the VM and the installation should automagically start:

You won’t have mouse support here, so just use arrow keys to navigate and then hit the <ENTER> key to select an option.

Assuming you want to use “English”, accept the default and just hit <ENTER>.  You’ll end up at the installation menu:

Leave the selection at “Install Ubuntu Server”, hit <ENTER> and you’ll end up at the language selection screen for the OS installation:

Select your language, or keep it at “English” and hit <ENTER>.  Next, you select your location:

Select your location, or keep it at “United States” and hit <ENTER>.

The next screen is pretty cool.  The Ubuntu install will attempt to detect your keyboard layout.

Unless you want to change the keyboard layout, just accept the default and hit <ENTER>:

The next two screens allow you to manually select the keyboard layout.  The first screen selects the language/nationality.  The second allows you to configure different layouts for the keyboard language.  Pretty cool stuff:

Again, change it if you need to; otherwise, accept the default values of “English (US)” and hit <ENTER> on both screens.

Next, come some progress bars:

It’s time to configure the network.  Since I’ve got this VM on an isolated private virtual switch, there are no DHCP servers available to hand out IP addresses.  Because of that, I get the following error:

No big deal, we want a static IP address anyway.

Hit <ENTER> to get to a menu with some new options:

“Configure network manually” should be highlighted, so just hit <ENTER>.  Configure the IP settings in the next few windows:

I don’t need a router address on this network, so I left the Gateway field blank.  Ditto with the DNS settings… I won’t need to worry about DNS resolution on this VM.  The next screen is the hostname, which I will use:

Put in whatever hostname you want, and this press <ENTER>:

Again, I’m not worried about DNS, so I’m not going to worry about a domain name, which is why I left it blank.

Enter whatever domain name you wish, then hit <ENTER>.

The next few screens are used for assigning a full name, a username and a password for logging into the router OS:

Enter the full name, the username and the password you’ll use to login to the router OS and hit <ENTER>:

If you want to encrypt your home folder (I don’t think it really matters for what I’m doing, but better safe than sorry, yes?), highlight “Yes” and hit <ENTER>:

Select your time zone and hit <ENTER>.

The next step is the disk setup.  You have a lot of options for partitioning the disks.  For what I’m doing, I don’t need anything fancy.  So, I’ll just go with the easiest options:

On the confirmation page, change your selection to “Yes” and hit <ENTER>.  More progress bars:

Unless you need one, which is highly unlikely, just leave the HTTP proxy field blank and hit <ENTER> so you can watch some more progress bars:

The next option gives the option of managing updates.  I recommend installing security updates automatically.  The other updates can always be downloaded manually:

Highlight “Install security updates automatically” and hit <ENTER>:

For my purposes, I need nothing but the very basics.

Leave this at the default settings (“standard system utilities”) and hit <ENTER> for another round of progress bars.  After that, got GRUB?:

GRUB is fine.  Accept the default value of “Yes” and hit <ENTER> for more progress bars and a friendly reminder to remove your installation media for the reboot:

This wraps up the installation.  If you found this helpful, please upvote below!