Ramkumar K R

Installing Fedora 10 on Microsoft Virtual PC was a biggest challenge for me in last 3 days, at one moment I thought I should move to Virtualbox and I wanted to give a try to Virtual box once I made this post virtualization tools . But unfortunately VirtualBox screwed up my WinXP host many times and I started to get the bluescreen of death very frequently.

Now, I have successfully completed my Fedora 10 (Cambridge) installation on VirtualPC today and made it work fine, I would like to share my experiences.

First, the problem was with graphical installer, it never loaded properly and on text install, the installer freezed many occassions and I had to redo all over again. Never I was able to finish the installation properly..

I found two useful resources at
–http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/archive/2008/05/19/installing-fedora-9-sulphur-in-virtual-pc-2007.aspx
and
–http://raj.jp/index.php/2008/10/12/virtual-server-garbled-screen-issue-with-fedora/
which solved my issues completely.

What you need to do is, the moment you get to see the boot menu as given below, you need to hit ‘TAB’ key.

This will present the command line where we can add extra boot parameters.
We need to add vesa noreplace-paravirt fbcon=map:9 i8042.noloop psmouse.proto=imps clocksource=pit as boot kernel options at the end of the existing commands shown there. This makes sure the graphical installer to work, along with mouse and handles Virtual PC ‘unrecoverable processor error occured and the virtual PC will be reset’ error while installation.

You can proceed the installation as usual, selecting packages and installing boot loader. Installation should go smoothly in graphical environment after you do the above.

After the installation, we need again the boot kernel options while restarting the virtual PC. You might still end up in a garbled screen as given below. What you can do at this moment is to leave the virtual PC started and use putty to make changes to the system. Connect to the virtual PC fedora installation from the host system using putty. and edit the files as explained below.

The boot kernel options can be set at /boot/grub/menu.lst file (except vesa) so that you need not add them every time you start the virtual PC!! . vesa has to be added at /etc/X11/xorg.conf under Section “Device” and as Driver.

This dont end here, if you need to use the text console only, you will still get a garbled screen like
Adding the following line to “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist” solves this issue in text/graphical environment too..
blacklist s3fb

Once you make the above changes using putty, type init 6 to reboot the system. Fedora 10 will reboot and now you can see a clean fedora 10 which you can use without any graphical issues !

Please let me know this post was of any use for you. Thx.

First, check sshd is running on your server
service sshd status

This will say whether its running or not. If not running check whether its installed and the service is made to run on boot.

Once you do that, you need to generate a set of public and private keys.
Download puttygen from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

Following steps will explain public/private key generation using puttygen and setting the key at the server.

1. Run PuttyGen.exe and click on the generate button. Make sure the selection is on SSH-2 RSA

2. You need to create some randomness by moving your mouse pointer in an uneven way till the progressbar gets completed.

3. Set a passphrase (optional) but would be better. Confirm passphrase in next field

4. Set a comment ( a useful one to recognize your key)

5. Save private key as .ppk for putty. You can have a public key by clicking save public key as well. Save this as .pub (public)

6. Copy the key for authorized keys file (as seen below)

Go to your server. Under the user’s home directory, create a .ssh folder (if it isn’t there). under it, open a file authorized_keys2 and paste the key what you copied above (step 6).

Test your login to the linux server using PuTTY. This time it should ask you for your passphrase.

You can turn off the keyboard-interactive authorization method in the file /etc/ssh/ssh_config. Its a good idea to do this, as your passphrase is generally a longer more complicated password. And the fact that your password gets echoed to the log.

This tutorial is another version of http://www.grahamlange.com/setting_up_ssh.html . Read it in case you need more explanations.
Thanks !

I was breaking my head installing Fedora core 10 on my microsoft virtual PC without any success. I went on searching more virtualization tools as I needed to get my fedora 10 get going…

Here are some info

1. Microsoft Virtual PC – Available for free from microsoft. Just go to microsoft.com , downloads section and download this one. You can create a virtual harddisk (a file on a host system and keep it anywhere). You can install a new OS in it.. (My Fedora core 10 couldn’t get installed.. thats where I am now !)

2. VMWare player – Another free tool available for download from http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/player_download.html . You can even get ready made virtual harddisks and use it (example fedora 9, 8 etc. You can download these and use straight away. No installation required)

3. Virtual Box – A GNU project . This is what I am gonna try now, kicking out microsoft virtual PC. Available free at http://www.virtualbox.org . I will post my experience soon.

Any other tools available which are good to be tried? Leave a feedback

Hmm.. I had got the above error from vsftp.

I googled around for some time and got some info on getting through this situation.

I just ran following command at shell..

/usr/sbin/setsebool -P ftp_home_dir 1

This worked for me, what about you?