The Lost Horizon: August 2009

Jirong Hu

August 22, 2009

I used to work in large organizations and when a new colleague told me about VMWare, I said “What VM, get a new machine, we have pretty of money.” After a few years, it turned out that I was wrong. Now I started to work in small companies and have to constantly evaluate some new tools. VM is so much helpful in this case.

1 Microsoft VPC and Hyper-V

Early this year, I started using VPC and Hyper-V when I had to work on the Microsoft Team Foundation Server. While I was trying hard to install Windows 2003, SQL Server, TFS, MSVS 2008, I found this baby, a VPC image with everything in it: Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server SP1 VPC Image (Trial), (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=72262ead-e49d-43d4-aa45-1da2a27d9a65&displaylang=en)

By a simple installation of Microsoft Virtual PC, (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/default.aspx), I have more than everything I want, and it’s all free! After this, I felled in love with these pre-loaded images. Whenever I need a new Windows 2003 for testing, I just create another copy of this VPC or Hyper-V image on Windows 2003 or 2008 servers.

2 Installing a Linux on Windows Vista

Today I need to have a Linux on my own laptop, so again I am looking into the VM solution.

2.1 VMWare Player

I knew there was free VMWare Player so I tried it first. After I installed the VM image for Ubuntu-7.10-server-i386 I downloaded somewhere, I found no login and password. Right, one of the problem I am having is there are so many varieties of Linux images out there, don’t know which one to pick.

VMWare Player can be downloaded from here: http://www.vmware.com/download/player/. The pre-loaded image with different guest OS can be downloaded from Virtual Appliances: http://www.vmware.com/appliances/

2.2 Sun VirtualBox

Then while I was searching Internet for other images, I found many people recommended this free VirtualBox from Sun. http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Pre-loaded images can be found here: http://virtualbox.wordpress.com/images/

At first, I download this copy from here: http://virtualboximages.com/Mandriva-Linux-Free-KDE-2009.1-Beta. But I got a few errors as shown below:

This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:pae

Unable to boot – please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.

I tried run this command with administrator privilege, seems not working still.

BCDEdit /set PAE forceenable

Then I downloaded this image, because I got a 64bit Vista installed. I got it run but it always crashes on GUI. Don’t know why.

http://virtualboximages.com/mandriva-free-2010-alpha-2-64bit

Then I go back to the previous 2009 version. http://virtualboximages.com/Mandriva-Linux-Free-KDE-2009.1-Beta

Finally I fixed the above error by enabling this setting shown below:

And also made the networking running by following this instruction (acutally not, in my case, the network is not connected. I click the Monitor and make it run):

Reseting the network adapter:
From the menu:Tools->System Tools->Network Center
Select the network adapter. Click on the disconnect button. Then click connect.