Installing Fedora Core 8 on Hyper-V - Ben Armstrong - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Installing Fedora Core 8 on Hyper-V

Benjamin Armstrong

31 Dec 2007 7:13 PM

Comments 15

Anyone who has installed Linux on Virtual PC / Virtual Server knows that while yes, Linux is supported on these platforms, and yes, it does run well after getting it setup - installation can be a downright pain. It is for this reason that I take great pride in the fact that installing Linux on the Hyper-V beta release is a breeze.

Installing Fedora Core 8 in a Hyper-V beta virtual machine involves:

Grab the i386 or x86_64 DVD ISO of Fedora Core 8 from here: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora (I am using i386 for this post).
Open the Hyper-V management console and choose to create a new virtual machine. Then configure your virtual machine as you want (I went with a default VHD size, and 512mb RAM) and specify that you are going to install the operating system off of a CD image file:
Once you have created the virtual machine open the virtual machine settings and remove the "network adapter" and add a "legacy network adapter" (you need to do this if you are not installing the integration components for Linux):
Connect to the virtual machine, and then start it. It should immediately boot of the ISO file you specified in step 2:
You can then follow through the installation - accepting the default values that are offered. Eventually it will start copying the files:
And at the end of it all - Linux is there and 'just works':

As you can see there were no special options / kernel arguments / hardware configuration involved. All very straight forward.

Cheers,
Ben

Operating Systems under Virtual PC / Virtual Server / Hyper-V, Hyper-V

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Comments

Tom

1 Jan 2008 1:59 AM

How about the VM Additions, e.g. Heartbeat, TimeSync, Shutdown, etc? Do they "just work" out of the box as well?
Christopher J. Buckley

2 Jan 2008 12:17 AM

Hi,

Just a very quick correction, Fedora 8 is simply referred to as such. There is no 'Core' in 8. Apart from that, a good article.

All the best,

Chris Buckley.

Red Hat, UK.
Wesley

2 Jan 2008 5:11 PM

Ben,

Have you tried to install and run any DOS games on Hyper-V?
Wesley

2 Jan 2008 5:11 PM

Ben,

Have you tried to install and run any DOS games on Hyper-V?
dennyhalim

2 Jan 2008 5:51 PM

it's more or less easier with virtualbox.

and it run on comodity hardware.

and it's free and even partly opensource
Hussam Al-Tayeb

2 Jan 2008 6:32 PM

Fedora 8 is distribution that is fully LSB compliant. So it is the perfect choice for testing. Excellent job Ben.
tobi

3 Jan 2008 4:46 AM

First, a happy new year to everyone.

Secondly, I second Tom's question: is it necessary to install VMAdditions to increase guest performance?

I would think that heartbeat and shutdown probably won't work out of the box, since there would need to be some services running within the guest OS...

But I am looking forward to Ben's reply on that =)

Tobias
Budwizer

3 Jan 2008 4:10 PM

Great article and good to hear that it is fairly easy to get up and running. Going to test this tonight.

One question... where can we get the VM Integration Components for Linux from? I ran across a posting that said they are on the Microsoft Connect site however I assume you have to part of the associated beta to get them.
Benjamin Armstrong

3 Jan 2008 9:00 PM

Tom / tobi -

Integration components are not included by default with Linux - but you can download them from connect.microsoft.com.

Budwizer -

You have to sign up to get them from connect.microsoft.com - but anyone can do this.

Chris Buckley -

I stand corrected :-)

Cheers,

Ben
Benjamin Armstrong

3 Jan 2008 9:01 PM

Wesley -

Yes, I have - but that is a post for another day.

Cheers,

Ben
Budwizer

3 Jan 2008 9:29 PM

I guess I am little slow today however I can not figure out how to sign up for the Integration Components from the Connect site.

I logon using my normal ID like usual and am able to see the betas I am already participating in however there is nothing mentioned for the IC's that I can find.

Can you point me in the right direction?

Thanks!
Budwizer

3 Jan 2008 9:32 PM

Disregard my previous post.. I finally found the link. Thanks again for the help!
John Schneider

4 Jan 2008 10:46 AM

Ben,

I'd like to ask a favor of you. When you reply to someone's post, especially when they have asked a question, could you please include the question, or at least a snippet of it in your response? I get the "New Content" email updates, and it would be nice to see the original question in the update. A good example of this would be your latest posts to Chris Buckley and Wesley. We have to go to the blog and backtrack through it to see what you were responding to. It would really be cool if all that info was in the email update.

Thanks again for running this, one of my top 5 favorite blogs!
Bryant Likes

4 Jan 2008 6:39 PM

Just curious, how is it that the dialogs in the post have an aero frame around them? Are they running on Vista or does Server 2008 support aero?

Thanks!
BrentP

21 Jan 2008 9:26 AM

I'm having problems installing Linux on hyper-v.

Fedora 8 will just sit and tick over once I select install from the menu on a console screen that ends with a line about not detecting an AMD southbridge (will provide a screenshot link if needed).

CentOS 5.1 (my perfered distro) will install, but once it rebots and goes into the menu to edit security and firewall settings it will continue to dump lines of garbage to the screen. I can manage to exit from the menu and get to the console and the lines continue to dump only now they are text and report a DriveSeekCommand error. I tried storing the VHD on different drives in case it was corrupt as well as using both dynamic and fixed sizes, but an install on all scenarios gave the same error.

Ubuntu 7.1 Server - Once it gets to actually installing will get to around 75% and 'deciding on kernel' before erroring with the complaint it is unable to locate a kernel.

I'm hoping these are related issues.