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.
Hi, I am trying to install Fedora 11 on a MS-VPC. the installation freezes at the end with a small window called “installing Boot Loader”.
Note: all the packages were completed and then the window appears as “Installing Bootloader” and is staying there since 70 minutes.
I have no idea what to do.
Please help.
hey guys,
the workaround is the same with Ubuntu 9.04, you will need to tab in the boot menu and change the boot line,
remove quite from boot line and replace it with “vga=791 noreplace-paravirt” instead, press enter and Fedora will boot in graphical mode without any problem, take the installation from there, for more info check:
http://helpdeskgeek.com/virtualization/installing-ubuntu-804-on-microsoft-virtual-pc-2007/
Cheers
Babo