Some days ago, I wrote my opinion about using Rust to provide sudo-rs in Ubuntu: Questing Quokka will be released next month, but you can already give it a try. I’m going to share my setup with VirtualBox, although I recently found an official solution provided by Apple.
I was an early adopter of Linux in the ’90s, and I’m still a big fan: nowadays I use macOS on all my devices, but I like to stay up-to-date with its development, and virtual machines are the best option to do so. I don’t own a powerful workstation at the time, then there are some limits.
I only own a Mac Mini with Apple M1 that I bought in 2020, so I had to wait for a compatible VirtualBox edition for a while. Now I can install it for my architecture without issues and run a full operating system. I didn’t see many glitches with the current LTS version of Ubuntu, even if I have only 16Gb of RAM.
Well, of course the potential RAM bottleneck is about macOS, and not Linux, but running both at the same time could have been painful. It hasn’t. If you installed VirtualBox by downloading it from the previous link, then you may want to add the Extension Pack as well.
I use to install it, because it guarantees a seamless experience. I don’t like to hit the [Esc] key to have the mouse pointer back on the host system desktop, for example. It provides others, more useful, features like the access to physical devices, and a network bridge.
Questing Quokka, at the time of writing, is still in a development phase, so you can download a snapshot of Ubuntu 25.10 that will be generally available in the next few weeks. There are several versions, but I need the 64-bit ARMv8 desktop image. I suggest to add the Guest Additions that now can be selected from the menu.
Adding a new virtual machine to VirtualBox 7.1.x let you do an unattended installation on the background, which means that you can go on doing whatever you want during the process. Just make sure to specify a user, its password, and a valid hostname. Now you can wait for the setup to finish.
You can always have a look at the preview, so you can check the progress every “x” seconds—you can choose between 1, 2, 5, and 10 or disable the refresh to save memory. It will take a while to complete, so consider to have a coffee in the meantime. It’s not like installing Gentoo from Stage 1, anyway.
If you notice that something is going wrong, you can click on Show and open the dialog window to intervene. I had an issue with Snapshot 4 that blocked the whole process, for example: I switched to the Daily Build. It’s still an early stage of the release cycle, so don’t expect it to work at 100%.
VirtualBox will try to allocate about 25Gb by default. Sometimes unattended installations fail, because the disk is full: even though the virtual memory allocation won’t actually use all of them. If you want to avoid any issue, try freeing at least 10Gb for the virtual machine.
Of course, talking about sudo-rs, you won’t see anything different: everything happens under the hood. You may want to read the release note to better understand what will be released next month. I’ll share yet another way of installing Ubuntu 25.10 on a Mac soon.
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