Browse Safely Using Virtualbox and Damn Small Linux

Nowadays the internet is become the main medium for spreading viruses and spyware. So its become more dangerous to surf the internet without any protection. Users have to frequently update their anti-virus and spyware definition in order to protect themselves against those viruses. But even if with all of this protection, there is still a change that your computer will infected with new viruses or spyware.

One way to ensure your computer safety is to create a virtual machine and use it to surf the internet by running Linux Live CD. When the virtual machine get infected with viruses you can get rid of it by simply rebooting the virtual machine. Because with Linux Live CD, the files/configuration you created during the session will be cleared when you shutdown or reboot the system. Beside that the possibility that Linux system get infected with viruses or spyware is low.

To create a virtual machine  you have to download Virtualbox from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and Damn Small Linux ISO image from http://damnsmalllinux.org/download.html. It will take a while to depend on your internet speed connection. Once the download complete. Double click the Virtualbox installer to install it. The installation process for Virtualbox is straight forward. If you have an experienced installing software before you will have no problem installing Virtualbox.

Once the installation complete, you can start the program by double clicking the short cut from the desktop or start menu.

Before you can boot DSL you need to create new virtual machine. To do that click Machine and select New.

Now click Next and enter your desire name for your virtual machine in the textbox below the Name. Select Linux from the combo box for Operating System and select Linux 2.4 for Version and click the Next button.

The next step is to select your desire physical memory to allocate to your virtual machine. Set it to 128 MB or higher depend on your computer available physical memory. But 128 MB would be enough to run DSL.

Now you need to create virtual hard disk for the virtual machine. Click New button.

Another welcome message will show up, click Next.

Select Dynamically expanding storage then Next.

Leave the default for Location. But set the virtual disk size to 50 MB then click Next.

The wizard will show the summary of the virtual disk you just created. Press Finish to complete the virtual disk setup.

Now you have 50 MB virtual disk allocated for DSL, click Next.

Congratulation you have successfully created your DSL virtual machine.

Before you can start the virtual machine you need to mount your DSL ISO image. To do that click on CD/DVD-ROM. Checked the Mount CD/DVD Drive checkbox and select ISO Image File. Now click the icon in the right side of the combo box.

Click Add icon in the toolbar. And browse to the location where you download your DSL ISO image and select the image and click Open.

Click Select button to mount the ISO image.

Now you can start the virtual machine by pressing the button Start in the toolbar.

When the GRUB splash screen appear press Enter to boot DSL.

DSL will only take a few second to boot in the virtual machine environment. You can access the system menu by right/left click on the DSL desktop.

DSL will run in windows mode but you can access the full screen mode press Left Ctrl + F.  Now you can surf the internet safely without worrying about your computer being infected with virus or spyware. Happy surfing…