Home Server, Virtual Server and Linux

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

I am running my home server on an AMD dual-core 4200 box with 4GB of RAM.  It mainly served as a file server, thought I could utilize it a bit more.  Running virtual machines is the natural choice.

I wanted to be able to run the VMS without login the home server, so it seems I need the Virtual servers:  Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMWare virtual server.  They both are free.

Since Home Server is essentially Windows Business Server 2003 stand edition, so I decided to try Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 first.

Within an hour, I have Virtual Server 2005 R2 installed and an instance of Windows Server 2008 Trial up and running.  That’s promising, but I did not want to run a trial version of Windows 2008.  How about Linux?

First, tried to install Fedora, but could not get anything going past the boot screen.  I gave up after several tries.  Decided to go with UBuntu.  Downloaded the desktop, and went a little bi further, but after the initial screen, everything went black.  After Googling a bit, found that was a color depth issue, following the instructions on the net and forty minutes later, I reached the final reboot screen.  

After clicking the button, the VM rebooted, but hang shortly after the boot screen.  Remember the old DOS days, if you had a piece of incompatible device driver, your machine would not even start.

Again, back to Google, but this time nothing came up.  Someone suggested going into to recovery mode at the grub screen.  That’s did not help, but it did prove one thing: indeed it hang while detecting some kind of device.

After hours of trying, I was at a point of giving up, then I noticed the “Enable hardware-assisted virtualization if available” check box.  I unchecked it, and powered on the VM.  Boom, everything worked!

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