Friday, January 4, 2008

Install Fedora 8 in Virtual PC 2007

For installation of Fedora in Virtual PC 2007, there are problems of display and mouse during graphical installation and when using X Window.

The problems can be solved by changing the kernel paramemter in the boot option and changing the grub.conf and xorg.conf after 1st boot of post installation


(1) at the 1st [graphical] screen, hit TAB to modify boot params;

- it will show "vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img";

- add "vesa i8042.noloop psmouse.proto=imps clock=pit"


Details:


- "vesa" selects "vesa" driver instead of the "s3" one; mandatory if you

want the graphics installer. This also allowed "Millions of colors" to be used post-install.


- "i8042.noloop" makes the PS/2 mouse work, otherwise it's stuck in the center of the screen; reference: comment #45 at

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=223606


- "psmouse.proto=imps" makes the mouse wheel work; optional as it's not that usefull during the install, but usefull to add it to kernel options for normal system use.


- "clock=pit", according to a MSKB article, resolves some problems with the time[r]; don't know how usefull is it during the install.


(2) at the 2nd [graphical] screen after boot of post install, hit TAB to modify boot params;

- add "vga=771 1"


so that the installation will go to linux single mode


(3) Edit the /etc/grub.conf

- add "vesa vga=771 i8042.noloop psmouse.proto=imps clock=pit"


(4) Edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change default pixel depths to 16 from 24



Section "ServerLayout"

Identifier "Default Layout"

Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0

InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"

EndSection


Section "InputDevice"

Identifier "Keyboard0"

Driver "kbd"

Option "XkbModel" "pc105"

Option "XkbLayout" "gb"

EndSection


Section "Monitor"

Identifier "Monitor0"

ModelName "LCD Panel 1680 x 1050"

HorizSync 31.5 - 67.0

VertRefresh 50.0 - 60.0

Option "dpms"

EndSection


Section "Device"

Identifier "Videocard0"

Driver "vesa"

EndSection


Section "Screen"

Identifier "Screen0"

Device "Videocard0"

Monitor "Monitor0"

DefaultDepth 16

SubSection "Display"

Viewport 0 0

Depth 16

Modes "1024x768"

EndSubSection

EndSection

(5) Reboot to continue post installation




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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 29, 2008 at 7:19 PM

    I try it but it doesn't work

    ReplyDelete
  2. javacomFebruary 29, 2008 at 8:00 PM

    Which step did you fail?

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousMay 4, 2008 at 4:47 PM

    Great! You helped me, Thanks! I had the problem that even text terminal was not working after installation. Changing my grub.conf made it fine.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousMay 9, 2008 at 2:04 PM

    I was able to install FC8 on Virtual PC 2007 using this procedure. Initially, it was a garbled screen and there was no way to edit any .conf files. I did a reinstall following the steps here, exactly mentioned. I actually didn't need the second boot parm edition (vga=771 1) etc. I got both the text window and GUI (startx) functioning with just the first boot parm changes.

    The other post that I found useful was http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.virtualpc/msg/a55d582c0a0ca3f0

    It was a bit more detailed, step bu step. But the second part (after step 15, where it suggests using a floppy image for xorb.conf) is probably not required when we do the boot parm setting - atleast FC8 in my install went through fine.

    Thanks to the community for all these valuable tips!

    Kalimani.

    ReplyDelete