Fedora 8 on Virtual PC
So, today is the big day. I installed Microsoft Virtual PC and downloaded the Fedora 8 Linux distribution DVD ISO. So we head off!
One nice feature of Virtual PC (VPC) is that it can capture an CD- or DVD-image (ISO) and simulate it in the CD/DVD-drive. So no more waste of cd’s burning all your ISOs. I let it capture the Fedora 8 ISO and it boots straightaway. I choose for graphical installation and that’s where the first problems occur.
This is what the screen looks like when it switches to graphical mode:
So this way I couldn’t install Fedora. I could go for the easy way and install in normal text-mode, but that’s not me. I wanted to find how I could make the graphical mode work. I remembered something about adding vesa to the kernel arguments, so I tried that. I rebooted the VPC and hit Tab when the install menu appeared and added the word vesa after vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img. This time it all worked fine, go a graphical installation, but the mouse was not working.
A little search on Google helped me out: adding also i8042.noloop to the kernel parameters should make it work. And it did. The rest of the install was straightforward. But don’t forget when the installation asks for additional kernel options to add i8042.noloop to it, otherwise you end up without a working mouse. Everything installed allright and the first boot was okay. Everything seemed to be working correctly.
Seemed indeed, as after a while I noticed repeating keys. Typing ls -la on a prompt, ended in llsss -laa. That’s not how it should be, and it is really annoying having to hit the backspace everytime. So I turned to my friend Google again and found the solution on the Microsoft website: another boot parameter clock=pit would solve this, and also the fact that the systemtime is running too fast on VPC. This worked indeed and it seemed the mouse was responding better also. But it only worked until I let yum update the system. The kernel was replaced by a newer version and suddenly the repeating keys returned. I checked the grub.conf file, but the options were still there. Looking at the boot-output via dmesg showed me the following line:
Warning! clock= boot option is deprecated. Use clocksource=xyz.
Okay, so I fired up VI and changed clock=pit into clocksource=pit and everything worked fine again.
So, my first Virtual Machine is working. This is the first one in a virtual network I want to create, with mixed Windows, Linux and UNIX systems, all talking an authenicating with eachother. A real challenge, but you have to waste your time on something, right?
June 19th, 2011 at 10:12
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