Install a Virtual Machine

There are a number of virtualization products available to create a Virtual Machine on your computer: Oracle VM VirtualBox, VMWare, QEMU etc.

You may already have one of these installed; if so, go to the next step.

If not, pick one of them, and follow the installation instructions for your computer.

I use QEMU now but in the past I have used VirtualBox and VMWare. They all work fairly well.

Download the Operating System iso

Install Pop!_OS

Go to the Pop!_OS website press the "Download" button.

I am using the Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS version.

Or use Ubuntu instead

As I stated in the overview, Ubuntu is "offically supported" so if you want to use that instead:

Go to the Ubuntu Desktop website and download the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS version.

Three steps to create a VM.

Create the VM

Follow the instructions for the virtualization product you have installed on your computer to create a VM.

  • Create the "Harddrive" that the OS will run on and how big the drive will be.
  • Decide how much memory the VM will be allocated.

  • Other parameters required by the virtualization product.

    • For this project, the parameters I used are:
      • 100GB HD
      • 8GB Ram

Install the OS into the VM

Follow the instructions for the virtualization product you have installed on your computer to actually install the OS onto the VM harddrive.

A word of caution about the userid you create as you install the OS

You create a userid when you install the OS and will probably use that userid to run db2 commands.

Make sure your userid meets the criteria below:

User IDs have the following restrictions and requirements:

Must have a primary group other than guests, admins, users, and local.
Can include lowercase letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), and the underscore character (_).
Cannot be longer than eight characters
Cannot begin with IBM, SYS, SQL, or a number.
Cannot be a DB2 reserved word (USERS, ADMINS, GUESTS, PUBLIC, or LOCAL), or an SQL reserved word.
Cannot use any user IDs with root privilege for the DB2 instance ID, DAS ID, or fenced ID.
Cannot include accented characters.

This threw me for awhile because I wanted to use "sysop" as the userid and then the DB2 LUW install would fail.

When done with this step, you usually need to shutdown the VM and then run it so it starts up the installed system and not the iso used to install the system.

Run the VM and update

Follow the instructions for the virtualization product you have installed on your computer to run the VM.

A new window should display with a login screen.

Login using the userid you setup when installing the OS.

There is a little more Initial Setup, just accept the defaults (or not, your choice) and set the Time Zone.

Open the Pop!_Shop application.

Click on the "Installed" button in the titlebar and then click "Update All" in the window listing all the updates that can be done.

To be "safe", after all the updates are done, restart the system.