I don’t think it’s necessary, even from a story perspective (the game does a great job of filling in the blanks for you). It’s definitely worth playing Portal 1 though, it’s a fantastic game with perfect design even nearly 20 years later. I mean apart from engine and graphics tech, I don’t think the game could be improved upon much. Same is true for Portal 2.

Another thing about Portal 1’s story is that it’s barely there at all. Almost all of it is incidental to the puzzles, and the story that is there is either passive exposition from the antagonist, or some very minimal environmental stuff. With that in mind, you could easily get yourself up to speed on the story going into Portal 2 just by glancing at a one or two paragraph summary, maybe with a couple of screenshots (you could probably convey everything in the story in one sentence if you’re creative with the punctuation). Portal 2’s story is much more fleshed out and interesting, though.

Portal 1 is so old and undemanding that you could probably run it smoothly inside a VM even on a meagre PC. I don’t know what OS you’re running, but I presume it’s not Windows?