Questions specific and sadly comphension focused

[80yearold]

Ashamed to admit how many times I have tried and failed but going to give this a shot see what happens.
1. New Toshiba out box win 7 which other then being my OS have no interest in.
2.. I lean towards Ubuntu and possibly Suse 11.3
3. Should I install from win 7 as host with ubuntu and suse as guests?
4. Is there any necessity to partition?
5. At the guest process for Ubuntu and Suse do I need the ISO on my HD or live CD's

Thanks to any kind soul out there help old man getting to Linux which is my only hobby so to speak.

[vbox4me2]

Have you read the Manual yet ?
Install Vbox on your w7 Host.
No need to partition anything, a virtual machine resides inside a VDI file, for the Host this is just a file like any other file, for a Guest this is where the OS resides and possibly also additional harddisks (other VDI's).
ISO is best to use to install a Guest OS, but most liveCD ISO's have install to harddisk options.
You mount an ISO for a Guest.

[80yearold]

I appreciate your response and since this is a new PC I want to take the best route for my usage.
So could we go into this with a more general approach focusing on preference,
Lets assume I set up my win 7 host with Ubuntu and Suse as the guests. Bearing in mind I am doing this on
a 350 GB HD.
My question is what is the advantage in doing this over lets say my creating an extended with Ubuntu and
Suse both on logical partitions with ample room to grow in a multiple boot process.
I guess I am trying to see the big picture. Its like in the past I tried Ubuntu as a windows file with wubi and
I tried it with Ubuntu on its own partition and the only advantage I see is removing the need to partition, kind
of similar to my setting up VB on this win 7 with Linux host.
Could give me your personal view. Again thank you for taking time to share

[vbox4me2]

You don't need to fiddle with partitions, your Guests live inside 1 single file, when created as dynamic they will grow when needed to whatever you set as maximum. You have to abandon this complicated thinking of partitioning, stick to one Host OS and run the rest as Guests.

Once you got things up and running then yes you can consider switching to raw formats and maybe resizing the main harddisk to seperate the Host from the VDI's.

[80yearold]

That said it all in a few words
Thanks