I decided to give Ubuntu a try in Virtual PC to see how this distro works. So far, I'm pretty damn impressed. But getting it up and running in a Virtual PC wasn't quite as obvious as I hoped it would be. Here are the steps if anyone else wants to try out this distro. I basically just went through a default install, and when the thing booted up it freaked out on the display. This is actually quite common with Linux distros that I've tried in Virtual PC. Keep in mind, I'm not even too terribly sure how to pronounce Linux, so I just kinda faked my way through the steps. You might know a really cool way to do some of these steps, and that would be great if you let me know
So after booting up in messed up graphics land, I was able to click the giant ass Reboot button on my 160x120 screen. When it was rebooting, I hit ESC during Grub and booted into the recovery console. This gave me root access (is this secure? Sure as hell didn't seem like it to me...). Once I was in there, I found the configuration file for the graphics card in /etc/X11. Sso type in cd /etc/X11, although I certainly hope even the most harden of MScentric people can figure that out :). Once in there I opened up xorg.conf using pico (so type in pico xorg.conf - isn't this fun?). Browse down to the screen section. Opps, looks like the defaultDepth property is 24, which VirtualPC doesn't support. I changed this to 16 and hit CTRL-X to exit (saving when prompted of course). Typed in reboot and awaaaaaaay we go.
Once I was logged in, I wasn't able to hit the internet but this was an easy enough fix. Just go to System | Networking and enable the Ethernet connection. At this point I was good to go. I don't think I have sound yet, but I really could care less. But if a wise soul would like to enlighten me, I wouldn't mind either.
So there we go. I'm impressed with how easy this was to get up and running (besides virtual pc graphics snafu), and it looks great too. I'm tempted to throw this on my laptop that I keep in my living room just because so many people use it. You'd be surprised what my friend's girlfriends manage to install while we are watching football. Stupid yahoo games. But I digress. So why all this trouble to post this on an ASP.NET site? I've been tagged with doing a lot of the design work for my companies new site, and well, the old version didn't exactly work in Linux, i.e. the menus and some content doesn't show up at all. Remember folks, Verdana isn't installed on everyone's PC. It looks like the default sans-serif font is pushing some of the content around, which was dumb of me not to anticipate, so I'll have to fix this. Good times. Good times.
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why installing under emu when you can boot with live cd?
you can test this distro all
the way you want. don't kill it with virtual pc's
emulation problems. boot it, see it, love or hate it
:)
btw - nice bloggie you have here...
oh yeah, you're right - sometimes
installing linux (i tried gentoo once) drives you crazy. there
are no problems with distros like red hat, fedora, madriva - nice and graphical interface makes installing a
snap. ubuntu and debian in general does not have such useful interface. txt based instalations could be a
problem novadays. but hey,
the hardest thing is partitoning. everything
after and before that step is rather easy imo.
i'm glad you liked this distro. it has this little
"something" that makes me using it from time to time. i just like it. it's
simple enough for me :)
so, good luck with your ubuntu abd
warm hello from
To get network to work go to the
System/Administration/Networking and enable the device. Mine was disabled by
default on both VPC 2004 and VS2005.
Thanks for the video fix.
A note about Virtual Server 2005: I couldn't get it to boot in the recovery
console using the web interface. The pe interface
worked fine.