VirtualBox does not support ARM-based architectures like the Apple silicon on these Macs yet so we'll need another option. Multipass from Canonical can launch and run virtual machines (instances) and configure them with cloud-init like a public cloud. In fact it's my preferred way to launch Ubuntu instances regardless of whether VirtualBox is available for my system.
Get it with Homebrew:
brew install multipass
See the list of images available:
multipass find
Useful commands when managing instances.
multipass help
multipass list
multipass start
multipass restart
multipass mount /Volumes/USB primary
multipass stop
multipass delete --all
multipass purge
We will:
- Create an instance from the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) image.
- Specify the number of CPUs, disk space, and amount of memory to allocate.
- Give it a name. If the name is
primarythe user's home directory is mounted inside the newly launched instance, inHome. Without any arguments, commands for managing instances will apply to the primary instance. - Install a desktop environment and a Remote Desktop server.
Launch the instance
You can do this with cloud-init or without it (manual configuration).
With cloud-init
Create a configuration file. It will update/upgrade the system, install the packages we need, and create a new user (cloudy) with a password for us to log in with Remote Desktop. This example uses a plain text password for simplicity but adjust it to your environment's security needs.
cat << EOF > cloud-config.yaml
package_upgrade: true
packages:
- ubuntu-desktop
- xrdp
- xsel
users:
- default
- name: cloudy
sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
shell: /bin/bash
lock_passwd: false
plain_text_passwd: 'supersecretpwd'
EOF
Launch the instance using the configuration file we created:
multipass launch jammy --cloud-init cloud-config.yaml --name primary --cpus 4 --disk 15G --memory 8G
Without cloud-init
You could also configure the instance manually instead. In this case we don't need to create a new user, we'll just manually set a password for the default user and use that one.
multipass launch lts --name primary --cpus 4 --disk 15G --memory 8G
Connect to the instance to install a desktop environment and a Remote Desktop server.
multipass shell
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop xrdp -y
Set a password for the default ubuntu OS user.
sudo passwd ubuntu
Access the instance's desktop
To access the newly-installed desktop we need the IP address of the instance. Find it either by running the ip addr command within the Ubuntu shell or by running multipass list on your Mac host.
Then use that IP address to connect with an RDP client like Microsoft Remote Desktop (available on the App Store). You can use the default user ubuntu if you manually set its password or the user cloud-init created with the password you specified.
Top comments (4)
Only question “why?”
I’d understand the reason to install, for instance, Windows, but Linux… beside unix system…
Here's another example: You can launch a number of Ubuntu VMs as a cloud native Kubernetes cluster, having all of them automatically configured by cloud-init as a MicroK8s node with c-groups enabled, extra kernel modules for NVMeoF, replicated container-attached storage based on OpenEBS, and object storage with MinIO.
Then when you're done with development, deploying to production is very easy whether it's a public cloud, an isolated location at the edge, or a bunch of Raspberry Pis in your homelab because you've already tested everything on a very similar environment.
There are many reasons. You could use an Ubuntu environment to test something on your Mac like a
snappackage or acloud-initfile. This also applies to any machine with an ARM architecture like a homelab where you want to set up machines as your personal "cloud" and launch instances pre-configured withcloud-init.I use Linux vm/container in macOS so I can have MSSqlServer for one of my project.