Tipping my Fedora, part 1

[last updated 2009.6.7]

So, we’re planning to move our library web site onto a Linux server on the campus system (long story omitted, for which all should be grateful).

Finally I have a practical reason to learn Linux.  The question is, do I enjoy or dread it?  I’d like to like it, really.

First, bear in mind that I started out (way back in the ’80s) with a Radio Shack Model 3, upgraded it to a Model 4, and then moved to a 80286 and MS-DOS, Radio Shack Xenix, Windows 3.1, and onwards.  The point being, I started with text-based operating systems, so it’s not a matter of avoiding them just because I can’t do everything with a mouse.

And Linux, at this point, is still very text-based because you seem to need to do some kind of typed instruction or file editing every time you want to do just about anything, including even the basic setup.

As a number of bloggers and columnists have commented, this kind of technical tweaking is a big barrier to acceptance of Linux by the general computer-using public.  Granted, it allows versatility, but most people don’t want to bother with that.  I’ve kind of gotten out of the habit of most of it, myself.

Special note: I’m going to skip a lot (a LOT) of the trial and error that went into this and just cover what actually worked in the end… mostly.  That will save a lot of space, believe me.  I’m also omitting all the “capture” dialogs when I go in and out of VirtualBox/Fedora back and forth to Windows.

Picking the distro

Linux comes in distributions, which are commonly called “distros” (not to be confused with “discos”).  The campus will use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is a “pay” distro, for the web site.

However, Red Hat set up an interesting system some time ago.  They took the Fedora distro of Linux and let it be available for free, and when people developed and tested out enough new good stuff on Fedora, Red Hat moved it into the next version of Enterprise.  Very enterprising of them, even if I do pun that myself.

So, to get more familiar with Red Hat Enterprise, I can just use Fedora for free.  In fact, the book I got to help is Fedora 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Bible by Negus and Foster-Johnson (9780470413395).

VirtualBox for a Virtual Machine

However, I was a little wary of dual-booting using my work PC (Windows XP Pro) or even my laptop (Windows Vista 64-bit), because I would need to switch operating systems about 15 or 20 times a day at work (I get a lot of rush interruptions, like the rest of our staff).  I had to be able to switch back to Windows to use programs there (many of them not compatible with Linux).

So, I decided to try using VirtualBox to create a “virtual” machine on each computer and then installing Fedora inside that.  That, of course, creates a separate set of problems and fixes, but that should be interesting.

I did look at some other virtual systems, but this was the one that seemed to have the most functionality with “guest” OS (operating system) while handling various systems on various host systems.

Off we go….

Downloads

First, I got the latest distro of Fedora, which turned out to be version 10.

Now, Fedora comes with either a Gnome (default) or a KDE graphic interface.  Pick one.  Or, pick both and try them both as separate installations.  I don’t know yet which one will be on the campus server, but I’m not sure it matters all that much for what we’ll be doing to manage the web site.

I created a folder in Windows for all the Linux stuff, and started downloading.

Downloaded the stock version of Fedora, which apparently uses Gnome.  This is freeware.  I had the option to get the version with the KDE interface, and I got that on my laptop at home, just to see the differences.

I also got the freeware for VirtualBox which allows me to run other operating systems (such as Windows or Linux) like a program inside Windows.  (You can also run Windows inside Linux, but that’s not relevant to my situation.)  You can set up several different virtual “machines” and start up whichever one you choose — say, have both Gnome and KDE versions of Fedora, a copy of Ubuntu, a beta version of some new system, etc.

Initial Setup for Fedora in VirtualBox

I loaded VirtualBox (version 2.2.4) and it showed a window with a “new” blue sun (well, it’s a Sun product).   This lets you set up the virtual machine for each system.

I set it up by naming my new virtual machine “fedora 10″ and giving it 512MB of memory to work with (out of my 2GB, so that’s 25% of my memory and still more than the minimum of 256MB recommended by default).

I pointed the CD/ROM to the F10-i686-Live.iso file  (to start with) to use.

I set a shared file pointing to the directories where I keep some HTML files, so I could use them in the browser in Fedora, and the Linux downloads, and I set a USB device filter up so it would detect my printer on a USB port.

I also set it up with an “expanding” default space of 8GB to start, so anything I added or changed would have room to be saved.

Once I had that, I used the green arrow “start” button.  Things progressed.  Patience was certainly required; sometimes there are long pauses with little or no activity shown in the VirtualBox “guest OS” window.  I sat there wondering if the program had locked up or what, and then something would happen…  but the little icon for the drive activity (a single CD) kept blinking at me every little bit, so I kept waiting.  (There’s also a little blue spinning arrow around the cursor some of the time, which may or may not be visible depending on the type of action.)

BTW (By The Way): the virtual machine shows up as a window inside the VirtualBox window, and while you can enlarge the VirtualBox to full screen, the virtual machine window of Fedora stays at 800×600 by default.  There is a “resize” option in VirtualBox but that just reduces the VirtualBox to fit around the 800×600 panel.  The “Auto-resize guest display” function in VirtualBox is grayed out at this point.  There’s supposed to be a way around this — more later.

The initial login is “automatic” so I did that, and Fedora loaded, using the .iso (“Live”) file to run.

Now I had a nice 800×600 window with Fedora inside VirtualBox.  VirtualBox has something in the icons along the bottom of the window for the USB (which says the printer is on that) and a file folder (which says the shared files I set up are there).

Whenever I clicked inside the Fedora window, I got a little popup from VirtualBox saying that Fedora could capture the cursor/keyboard action for use in Fedora, and I could swap in and out of that using the right CTRL key.  When I approved that, I could work in Fedora.  I could get out by hitting the right CTRL key again.

Fedora 10 has the taskbar at the top with Applications  Places  System and the Firefox button and one for the mail/calendar app provided.  Fedora 10 with Gnome comes with a nice little batch of basic application software like Firefox and ABI Word and such.

In the “panel” (Microsoft doesn’t like you to say “window” when it’s not in Windows, apparently — but at least Linux didn’t elect to call them “doors”) below, are icons for Computer, liveuser’s Home, Trash, and an opened box with a disc saying Install to Hard Drive.  For starters, I am simply “liveuser”.

The “install to hard drive” function lets Fedora (inside VirtualBox) set up a space on my hard drive so Fedora runs faster from that and I can do some long-term work that gets saved.   I started with that and doubleclicked.

Little green dot flashes on the single CD icon at the bottom of the VirtualBox window.  Got a big white box with a small Fedora graphic and a Next button.  Clicked on that.  Got to select my language (U.S. English, as opposed to U.S. International or United Kingdom).  Got to choose a host name, and the default was localhost.localdomain, so I went with that.  Select a city for time zone — but nothing in a lot of states in the middle of the U.S., so I ended up with Chicago as being in the same time zone as Arkansas, at least.

Root password was next, so I set that.  Very important, as I was going to need to do a lot of stuff as root.  Warned my choice was “weak” but stuck with it.

Next I got a scary warning:

The partition table on device sda (ATA VBOX HARDDISK 8189 MB) was unreadable.

To create new partitions it must be initialized, causing the loss of ALL DATA on this drive.

This operation will override any previous installation choices about which about which drives to ignore.

Would you like to initialize this drive, erasing ALL DATA?

Very nice — obscure, confusing, and scary, all in one.  Went to the VirtualBox forum, and finally learned that all this does is format the one little spot you already reserved, and not your entire hard drive.  Given that Fedora doesn’t “know” it’s running in VirtualBox, it also doesn’t “know” that it’s only formatting that one little spot only, rather than setting up a normal boot.  I can cut it some slack on that, but it’s nerve-wracking the first time.  I thought that’s what it meant, but I wasn’t eager to find out that I had guessed wrong.

I told it Yes, and it then moved to another screen about partitioning the hard drive.  I didn’t change anything, but I did check the Review and modify partitioning layout box so I could doublecheck on what was being done.  Yes, just the one little spot being done, according to the layout screen — under 8GB.

Another warning, and then an install boot loader option, which I left in place.  Approved that and moved on.  Another option about replacing files, and approved that (the default was to stop, but I changed it).

Copying live image to hard drive was shown, and the blue line crawled slowly across to mark progress while the little blue arrow circled around the cursor.  Don’t plan on doing much while this is going on, but you only do it once per virtual machine.

Finished up and displayed a congrats screen and told me to reboot the system.  That only means rebooting the virtual machine, not the entire PC.

Went back to the Fedora desktop, and System dropdown menu, and selected Shutdown (not Restart – I needed to change something in VirtualBox) and went through those steps.

Fedora 10 showed up as “powered off” in VirtualBox, so I changed the CDROM in the VirtualBox Settings (that’s why I shutdown rather than restarted) to use the Host CD and checked the “Passthrough” box, using the E: drive (not the D, which would be my hardware CD drive) and then started Fedora 10 again.  You don’t want to use the same .iso file as before since that is for a “Live” version, and you are running on the virtual E: hard drive now.

This time the little VirtualBox icon that looks like a stack of CDs indicating the virtual hard disk was the one with the blinking green dot activity.

Welcome screen, ready to finish the setup.  It wanted to create a standard user and password, for when I didn’t need the extended authorizations of root.  I set up a login for that.

Time and date came next, and I set the time.  It then asked permission to send info on my PC’s configuration to Fedora, and I agreed (nothing confidential in there — I checked).

Now it showed a login for the user I’d just created, and “Other”.

After logging in as my regular user, I got the desktop, but now my user name was on the Home icon.

Now I went up to the Devices menu in VirtualBox and clicked on Install Guest Additions and it told me the software should be automatically started, and asked if I wanted to run it.  I approved.  It installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions and now in the VirtualBox window it showed that .iso file as the CD/DVD-ROM image (instead of the E: drive).

That created a desktop icon with a CD graphic labeled VBOXADDITIONS_2.2.4_47978 .  That showed I was using the VBoxGuest Additions for this release of VirtualBox, which made it more compatible with use in VirtualBox (I certainly hoped).

I checked System and printers — and no printer.  It searched and didn’t find it.  I turned my printer off and back on, and got a Windows popup for the VirtualBox USB to be installed, so I installed it.

Shutdown Fedora, and start it again — this time with the printer showing in the VirtualBox USB icon.

System > Administration > Printing and install a printer.  Looked for and found my Canon inkjet.

Now, Linux apparently has some trouble here, as a lot of manufacturers haven’t bothered to create printer drivers for Linux.  I did some checking, and the one for a printer can be found at the Linux Foundation site search box.  The one for my Canon i560 was called bj8pa06n.upp (well, that’s certainly descriptive…NOT) which is described as “a set of UPP files for the Canon BJC-8200 which comes with Ghostscript 6.50 or newer”.  I looked for the BJC-8200 in the list instead and used that one, and did a test print.  Seemed to work fine, so I went with that.

Still stuck at 800×600 resolution.  That’s next.