Installing Fedora7 in a VirtualPC2007 guest?

Bo Berglund bo.berglund at telia.com
Mon Sep 3 20:53:20 UTC 2007


This is a more appropriate subject for the thread where I would like
to get some advice on how to actually succeed in getting Fdora7 to run
in a virtual machine under Microsoft VPC2007.

I started a thread about editing xorg.conf on a command prompt and
this thread evolved into a more general discussion on various problems
in running F7 in a VPC2007 machine.
I have not yet suceeded in getting it to work, unfortunately....

To summarize the problems concerning using VPC2007:

1) VPC2007 emulates a Trio64 video card, but unfortunately not 100%.
The 24 bit color depth mode is not supported unless the VESA driver is
used. The S3 Trio64 driver's usage of 24 bit color breaks the display
completely.

2) VPC2007 emulates the keyboard and mouse as PS/2 devices. THis was
not a problem until recently when the Linux kernel acquired a bug of
sorts when it does not recognize the PS/2 mouse out of the box. No
mouse means no install...

The workarounds I have found so far are these:
A) On initial install from the Fedora 7 install DVD (I use the iso
image for this) one needs to use the TAB key on the start screen to
edit the start parameters by adding:
vesa i8042.noloop psmouse.proto=imps clock=pit vga=771
With this the install shows a good graphics screen and the install
proceeds well until the final screen where the "Restart now" button is
located.

B) At this point one has to capture the DVD iso image in VPC again so
it starts off the DVD for the first boot after install. Select Repair
and go to the prompt.
Then give command chroot /mnt/sysimage and use 
"nano etc/X11/xorg.conf" to edit that file.
Change the color depth from 24 to 16 (two places) and save the file.
Then release the DVD and exit twice and then the installed image will
boot up.

C) On this startup again use TAB to change the start options and add
the same parameters as above. This makes the initial text based boot
screen show the Penguin and a number of commands and the target is to
get it into X with a good screen.

This is where I don't get further now. I see a black screen with an X
cursor for a while then the cursor disappears and it is all black. The
window resizes a couple of times with intermittent mouse cursor
display and then settles into an all black screen without mouse
cursor.

As a variation on this theme my first attempt missed the step C
(change start parameters after editing xorg.conf). That time the
following screens were all garbled and I finally just reset the
virtual machine and on the subsequent start I added the start
parameters described above.
This time it got me all the way into Fedora as root and I could add
myself as a normal user account (using the normal tools because the
first boot sequence of wizard-like screens were not shown).
Anyway I also accepted the updates Fedora found on the Internet and at
the end of that it suggested a reboot, which I did.

After the reboot I was again stuck in the graphics nightmare!
Garbled screen twice the width it should be and no clue as to what I
could do...

So this is where I am and I think there are mote VPC2007 users that
also have the same problems.

Is there anyone here who has gotten this up and running properly in
VPC2007 and if so how?


Bo Berglund




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