Saturday, July 18, 2009

Fedora On Virtual PC 2007

While trying to install Fedora on Virtual PC 2007 running on my Vista Home Premium laptop, I was plagued by boot hangs. Usually, the CD would fail to boot on:
running /sbin/loader
It seems the way around this was to add a directive to the installer:
clocksource=pit
I'm going to blame this on my AMD Turion64 CPU, as few others had come across the same problem.

The problem that had gotten everyone else was the graphics levels between Linux and VPC are not compatible. The solution to that was to add:
vesa
This forced Linux into a 16 bit color mode. Once the install was complete, both options needed to be added to GRUB.

The next problem was the network. I had to attach the VM's network to the physical interface on the laptop. I had expected to be able to use a NAT interface, but I suspect this was my own fault for using my network install server rather than an DVD image.

Alas, my first successful install was Fedora Core 4, but when it booted up, I could not login. The clocksource was running so fast, PAM timed out the username and password within a matter of seconds. In all fairness, FC4 is eons old. I found a 32 bit DVD ISO for FC6 and F9 on my install server, so I'll give them a shot and see if they run any better.

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