VirtualBox on Windows Machine

09/16/15

So, sometimes I feel like being on my desktop computer, and also doing productive stuff, linux-style. The problem? My desktop is usually booted to my Windows side, and switching to my Ubuntu side is just annoying enough that I'd rather pick up my chromebook than deal with that.

I have messed around with various work-arounds to this problem. What I tried just yesterday was ssh'ing to this here server via a Chrome extension called Secure Shell.

That worked... okay. For some reason I kept losing connection to my server via ssh, and Secure Shell throws a bit of a hissy fit when I do that.

However, I use Secure Shell on my chromebook, which never complains in that way, and I figured it was because I was shelling into my local OS. And so I decided to install a virtual Ubuntu 14.04 onto my external harddrive, and boot it on my Windows OS via VirtualBox.

I then setup port forwarding so I could ssh to my newly created ubuntu server from my Windows Secure Shell tab in Chrome. From there, I setup ssh-keys to not need to enter my password everytime, and then setup ssh-keys between my virtual server and this server.

I then git cloned this here site repo that I have saved on my server, and now I'm writing this post from my Windows desktop, but it just feels like I'm writing it on my chromebook but with an extra-large screen.

It kinda feels like I wanted to downgrade my Windows machine to a chromebook so I could feel comfortable working on it. Oh, well, this is how my brain works, and I enjoy the setup. It was also kinda a learning experience getting this all setup. Perhaps a future post will explain the process in better detail.