Time for action – using the BitNami Drupal virtual appliance

In this exercise, you'll learn how to download, install, and use the Drupal virtual appliance from http://www.bitnami.org in your VirtualBox host.

1. Open a web browser window on your host, go to http://www.bitnami.org/stack/drupal, scroll down until you locate the VM section, and click on the Download link.

2. Wait for the open/download dialog box to appear, and save the Drupal VM file (bitnami-drupal-6.14-0-opensuse-11.1.zip at the time of this writing) to your hard drive.

3. Once the file finishes downloading, go to the directory where you saved it, and extract its contents. The .zip file contains three files: bitnami-drupal-6.X-X-opensuse-11.X.vmdk, bitnami-drupal-6.X-0-opensuse-11.X.vmx, and README.txt. To create a Drupal virtual appliance in VirtualBox, you'll only need the .vmdk file.

4. Open VirtualBox, and click on the Start button to create a new virtual machine. Type DrupalVB in the Name field, select Linux as the Operating System...