Running Ubuntu Linux in a VirtualBox VM

I've recently started a new job which requires me to build software under Ubuntu Linux.  Since I don't particularly care for the Ubuntu distribution and having only a single development PC which runs Windows 10, the natural solution is to create a VirtualBox virtual machine and install Ubuntu in that.  However the combination of VirtualBox and Ubuntu caused a few problems for me.

The first problem I encountered is that VirtualBox seems determined that new VMs will all run at very low resolutions.  I've seen 640x480 being used on when running VirtualBox on both Macs and PCs running Windows 10 and it's ridiculous to be stuck with a resolution that first appeared in 1987.  At that resolution, it's difficult to get through the Ubuntu installation setup as some of the buttons appear off the screen.  That issue I believe is Ubuntu's fault.  They should make it possible to see all buttons regardless of screen resolution.  Poking around on Google, I discovered that there's a command line utility included with VirtualBox which allows you to run higher resolutions in the guest OS in VMs.  First make sure that VirtualBox is not running.  Start a command prompt with administrative privileges and navigate to the directory where VirtualBox is installed since the utility we need is not located in the command path.  The directory you want will most likely be something like "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox".  Issue the command "VBoxManage setextradata global GUI/MaxGuestResolution any".  This plus installed the Guest Additions tools in the guest OS should allow you to change your VM to a higher resolution.

The second problem I encountered was after I installed the GUI version of my favorite editor, Vim, using the command "sudo apt install vim-gnome".  I was able to launch gvim but the menu was hidden which makes accessing a few features more difficult than necessary.  It turns out Gnome on Ubuntu has a bug which prevents some applications from displaying a menu bar.  The workaround is to define a command alias to launch Vim which undefines the UBUNTU_MENUPROXY variable.