Ubuntu Studio on Virtual PC 2007
So I thought I’d fire up Virtual PC 2007 and try out Ubuntu Studio in a virtual environment before I go ahead and pollute a partition I have allocated for linux at some point with it.
Not the easiest OS I’ve installed, but it seems the Virtual PC environment has a lot to do with it.
I started by downloading Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (it’s free!) here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx
After installing it and setting up a new virtual system as “other” since it only seems to have pre configurations for windows products (not really a surprise there) I upped the default memory to 512Mb from 128Mb (I’ve got 2Gb to play with on this machine…)
I downloaded the Ubuntu Studio ISO (710) from http://ubuntustudio.org/
Started up the Virtual PC, “captured” the ISO image, and followed the install process. It took quite some time… but eventually it finished. Upon reboot, this brought me to a rather garbled screen, which after some searching about I discovered that Virtual PC doesn’t like the color depth set to 24 bit, to function properly, it needs to be set to 16. A decent walk through is here: http://arcanecode.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/installing-ubuntu-610-on-virtual-pc-2007-step-by-step/
I basically followed the guide there with the exception of blindly working through the login screen to get a terminal window, I hit “ESC” when the grub screen appeared at boot, selected the “recovery mode” option, and got straight to a ROOT command prompt. Typed in:
nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Press CTRL+W (Where is) and when prompted key in DefaultDepth and press enter. You should now be landed on DefaultDepth. Cursor over to the 24… And hit delete twice, then type in 16. Now hit CTRL+O (WriteOut) to save the file, and press enter to take the default xorg.conf file name. Then hit CTRL+X to exit.
Another issue I had was the mouse was not being captured, so once I closed the xorg.conf, I followed this: http://arcanecode.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/installing-ubuntu-710-under-virtual-pc-2007/
Again, I started from the “recovery mode” prompt (I just stayed there, and did the fix before rebooting… this involved editing the menu.lst of grub, so I typed:
nano /boot/grub/menu.lst
Scrolled down past a lot of default config crap, added the ” — i8042.noloop” to the kernel line, saved and exited. (same as before)
Now, I rebooted, and this gets me into the GUI. However, I encountered the following error upon logging in:
“Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you log in.”
useful info here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-control-center/+bug/146946
Solution I used here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-control-center/+bug/146946/comments/28
Basically, run synaptic package manager, search for dbus, and install dbus-X11 (apply), close, logout of the GUI, and log back in… I now had the fancy Ubuntu Studio styled desktop that was in the screenshots rather than the default ubuntu/gnome desktop (menus etc)
That’s it… now when I reboot the virtual PC, I get my new Ubuntu Studio OS to play around with!