Installing Ubuntu Linux in Virtualbox and formatting hard drives

Updated for MacOS Ventura and Virtualbox 7

Installing Ubuntu in VirtualBox 


Download Ubuntu. I used 22.04

Download VirtualBox.

Install VirtualBox

Run the un-attended installer

Make the Ubuntu Virtual machine

Start VirtualBox and Click new


Choose a name like Ubuntu
and choose the ubuntu iso image you downloaded

Unattended Guest OS install setup

Choose your Username and password.

Tick Guest Additions

Memory and processors

Choose memory size and how many CPUs. I used the minimum requirement for ubuntu 22.04:
4096 MB and 2 processors

Virtual Hard disk

Choose Hard disk size. I used the minimum requirement for ubuntu 22.04:
25 GB

Installation is finished

Change the language

When I installed unattended Ubuntu I had to change the language to get terminal to run. Changing it to English (united kingdom) works. You can change it back to English (US) after a restart

Click on the icons in the upper right corner and choose settings

Choose Region and language
and Change language and restart.

Change USB settings on the Ubuntu virtual machine

Ubuntu – settings:

Enable
Ports – USB – USB 3 (xHCI) Controller

Running terminal

Run terminal

Click on 9 dots in the bottom left corner

type terminal and click on the terminal icon

Adding a user to the sudoer list

If using a custom user name you might get an error saying that the user is not in the sudoer list. To fix this you can add the user to the sudoer list.

Login as root with the password you set. Then add your user to the sudoer list and reboot

su -l 
usermod -aG sudo theusernameyouused
reboot

Updating Ubuntu

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade


Formatting a hard drive with gparted

Use Virtualbox – Devices – USB and enable the hard drive.

Note:
When using a USB-C (3.1) hard drive on a Macbook Pro, I had to connect it to a Belkin USB-C Multiport adapter (#ad) with a USB 3 port to get it working. Ubuntu in Parallels does not have the same problem.

In terminal. Install gparted.

sudo apt-get install gparted

Run GParted and format hard drives like I do in this post

sudo gparted


Compile and install asdcplib tools

https://github.com/cinecert/asdcplib
https://cinecert.com/opensource/

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install build-essential
sudo apt install git
sudo apt install libssl-dev
sudo apt install cmake
git clone https://github.com/cinecert/asdcplib.git
cd asdcplib
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Test the compiled tools

Run kmuuidgen to generate a UUID

kmuuidgen

Running asdcp-unwrap to extract the wav files from a mxf sound file

asdcp-unwrap sound.mxf

Running Subtitle Edit in ubuntu.

You can run portable Subtitle Edit in Ubuntu using mono. It runs smoother in Windows in parallels, but running it in Ubuntu in VirtualBox is free.

For more info see the help section on the Subtitle edit web page here.

Install mono, libmpv-dev, and these other packages first:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install mono-complete
sudo apt install libhunspell-dev
sudo apt install libmpv-dev
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr
sudo apt install vlc
sudo apt install ffmpeg

Download subtitle edit portable from theSubtitle Edit web page and uncompress the zip file.
Run subtitle edit with the command

mono SubtitleEdit.exe

4 thoughts on “Installing Ubuntu Linux in Virtualbox and formatting hard drives”

  1. Thanks for all the info. If I purchase a pre-formatted CRU drive EXT3 per ISDCF specifications, will I be able to copy the DCPomatic created files from my Mac hard drive to it using Paragon ExtFS?

  2. Knut Erik Evensen

    Hi.
    The drive will not mount in Mac OS with extfs innstalled if the drive is not cleanly unmounted.
    You need to analyze and maybe do a repair on the partition in disk utility to be able to mount it.
    Linux will mount most drives.

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