To get started with VirtualBox, just visit the website and download the package for your distro. I use Debian/Ubuntu, so I get the appropriate (.deb) package and then I install it with the command

sudo dpkg -i VirtualBox-MyDistro.deb

While installing, you are presented with a couple of dialogs. From my memory, these dialogs are only informative dialogs (only an OK button). Just take the defaults and proceed through the installation.

One of the dialogs informed you that a group "vboxusers" was going to be created. To run a virtual machine, a user must be a member of this group. We want to run the following command to make ourselves (an any other VirtualBox users) a member of this group

sudo adduser duane vboxusers

On Linux, once you add a user to a group, the user has to completely log out of the machine (not just the current terminal) and then log back in for the change to take effect. As a side note, if you tried to start VirtualBox before adding your user to the vboxusers group or before logging out and logging back in, you'll need to fix the problem, then run the command

VirtualBox shutdown

this will reset the state of VirtualBox and then you can start the program normally.

Using VirtualBox should be just like using most any other virtualization software that you have used in the past. I'd rather not go through the specifics here unless someone wants more information. We have covered virtualization and emulation in a past meeting, so we'll just assume we can all get a virtual machine up and running.