Installing minikube on Ubuntu

The process is really simple:

• Decide which version should be installed by visiting this location: https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/. The options are as shown below at the time of writing. For Ubuntu — select shown combination.

Options for minikube

• The next command is “minikube start”, for this either underlying kernel should support hypervisor or there should be support for virtualization or containerization. Since the installation is directly started, most likely there will be error “Unable to pick a default driver”

Unable to pick a default driver

• To fix this error any method can be picked, I’d recommend KVM for following reason:

1. Why put another virtualization layer on top OS, when hypervisor can be put directly into OS. This rules out vmware, virtualbox
2. Why put another containerization layer on top of OS, when hypervisor can be put directly into OS. This rules out docker, podman
3. qemu is emulation, while KVM is special operating mode of qemu, and uses CPU extension for virtualization via kernel module. So if the underlying CPU supports virtualization qemu can be ruled out.

Note to find out if machine supports hardware virtualization or not use this command — “egrep -c ‘(vmx|svm)’ /proc/cpuinfo”. If the output is 1 or more, it does.

• Follow this link to ensure KVM is installed — https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/Installation
• Post these steps when minikube is run with “minikube start” command it should start

minikube running