Installing Linux on a Windows hosted VM? Use Unbutu!

[Nocturnal]

Hi,

I had Fedora 13 working quite well under VirtualBox on Vista x64 but then things went South when I installed more packages in an attempt to build the astrometry.net code. At some point the keyboard would no longer send characters to the VM. Mouse still worked fine in most cases. Other times the machine would simply freeze. Not good.

So I downloaded VMWare Player and tried again. Things went reasonably well until I tried to install the guest extensions. I could not convince the installer that the kernel headers were indeed installed. Google was no help except that I read that VMWare is behind on F13 support. So I figured I'd install a Linux version VMWare actually recommends. Novel idea!

I then downloaded an Unbutu ISO. VMWare has an automated install facility for that OS which adds all the extensions. Sweet! Native monitor resolution right out of the box! I still need to setup a PCL compilation environment and attempt to compile Astrometry but so far this has been smoother than F13 and PCBSD.

Anyway.

[Nocturnal]

Eh, it's UBUNTU. Somehow I keep saying UNBUTU. A silly name regardless.

[Carlos Milovic]

Say that to all the african natives who died for mispelling the name...


Jokes apart, it has a deep meaning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28philosophy%29

[Nocturnal]

Doh!

[Niall Saunders]

Hah, Sander - you and I are going to be burned at the SAME stake !!! (The only difference is that there might be some BBQ sauce at your side of the fire )

[Juan Conejero]

Which Linux distro you use for PI/PCL development is up to you; there should be no problems with Ubuntu provided you use an up-to-date version.

Personally, I don't like Ubuntu, but this is just a matter of personal taste. I think Fedora 13 should work fine as a guest under VMware Workstation 7.1. I use VMware WS 7 extensively on Fedora 13 hosts and it works like a charm. Fedora 12 is officially supported as a VMware guest and it will provide you a perfect PCL development environment.

All that said, I really don't like Linux too much once I've taken the plunge for FreeBSD. BSD rocks!

[georg.viehoever]

...
I had Fedora 13 working quite well under VirtualBox on Vista x64 but then things went South when I installed more packages in an attempt to build the astrometry.net code. At some point the keyboard would no longer send characters to the VM. Mouse still worked fine in most cases. Other times the machine would simply freeze. Not good.
...

Fedora13 on VirtualBox works without problems for me (see http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=2126.msg14159#msg14159). I don't know what went wrong in your case.

Georg

[Nocturnal]

It is indeed strange but the Ubuntu->VMWare Player has been so much more pleasant that I see no reason to investigate further. The instability happened after installing packages to support astrometry.net installs. Hard to imagine that had such an effect but it's all I can think of.