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Some time next week when I have time, I will replace the drive and load Ubuntu. I also want to run virtual Windows. I will need help on doing that.
If you are working on the virtual machine (Windows), can you download something and save it to Ubuntu?
A couple of things. You will need to check to see if the CPU on your machine is capable of hardware virtualization (INTEL-VT or AMD-V). You can do it in software, but it is so much slower. You will need to have additional RAM for it to work well. There are a number of virtualization programs, Virtualbox is one popular one. You can find some prebuilt images, or can create you own.
The virtual machines act as completely separate computers, each with their own filesystem. Therefore, if you want to share information between them, you have to rely on the network for file transfer. It it would mean setting up your host computer as a SMB or NFS server (assuming you are running Windows virtually) or use a separate NAS to hold your files, which can be mounted to the guest machine filesystem.
Setting up Linux as a host computer and Windows as guests is the best strategy. You want your most stable and resource light OS as the host. Besides, it has all the server tools at your disposal should you want to set up network file sharing.
My experience is doing this as a hobby on my home machines (i.e., I do not do this for a living), and have not kept up with advances in the technology. This is based on my personal experience, all the way back from the early releases of VMWare when it was free for personal use. It sounds like Shashi, and likely Roscoe (and others) do this for a living, so probably best to get help from them for specific problems. There are some excellent guides out on the Internet in setting this all up. It is actually pretty easy to do, and prebuilt images make it a snap.
David