JEOS stands for Just Enough Operating System. It is great environment for building virtual machines without all the clutter of a windowing system, games, office products, etc. It is from Ubuntu and you install it using the Ubuntu server install, but rather than picking a standard install, press F4 and choose “Install a minimal system.” Note: The “Install a minimal virtual machine” is specific to VMWare and I plan to use VirtualBox. Be sure to include Open SSH in the install so that it installs sshd. *** Also, if you plan to install XE, you’ll need to modify the partitions to have a larger swap space (at least 1.5 G). *** Once the install is done, I find it useful to install a few other items. Update Ubuntu apt-get update Install some other tools apt-get openjdk-6-jre Yes, java will be included in any of the WebLogic installs, but I need this one if I want to do remote display (for config wizards, etc). apt-get gcc Some apps require to rebuild the kernel modules, so you’ll need a basic compiler. Install guest additions (Choose the VirtualBox Devices->Install Guest Additions…” option. This sets up a /dev/cdrom or /dev/cdrom1. You’ll need to manually mount this temporarily: sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt Then run the linux .bin file. Update nofile limits. Most java apps fail with the standard ubuntu settings: edit /etc/security/limits.conf and add these lines at the end: * soft nofile 65535 * hard nofile 65535 root soft nofile 65535 root hard nofile 65535 These numbers are very high and I wouldn’t do this on a production system, but for this environment it is fin. To get rid of the annoying piix error on boot, add the following line to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file blacklist i2c_piix4