I built a Sun Virtual Box VM based on Centos 4.7. June 2009. This item is now deprecated.
1st Impressions
Its a long time since I used Red Hat. If you don’t want to cut CD’s use one of the single file .iso images. I used the DVD version.
When I tried to install it on my XP SP/3, the install process failed and rolled back. This trouble ticket, #3701 details how to fix the windows registry which was damaged at v2.2.0.
The Centos install process installs an SMP and uniprocessor version into GRUB and grub is configured to start the SMP version as default. This thread, entitled CentOS 4.7 guest won’t start, suggests that one should configure PAE/NX=on for the SMP image, which is not the default at V2.2.4. So I have set it and it works for me.
The screen resizing doesn’t work well out of the box but there’s a sticky thread called “Howto: Install Linux Guest Additions + Xorg config” in the Virtual Box Linux Guests forum.
There’s a sudo error. The default admin user is not authorised to use sudo. (See this at the Red Hat knowledge base.) One needs to unhash a line in the sudoers file and add the admin user to the sudoers group using visudo & usermod.
Locate needs updatedb run, but apropos works and I can’t find catman, even using apropos.
Shared Folders
Works as expected, define the share name in the GUI, install
# mount -t vboxsf sharename ${mountpoint}
# ls ${mountpoint}
then add the line to /etc/fstab and test using mount -a
# echo sharenamet ${mountpoint}t vboxsf >>/etc/fstab
# mount -a
Python 2.4
Looks like we need a parallel i.e. source code install and use the PATH statement to allow bzr and planet if necessary to utilise it. Certainly, bzr will not install against python 2.3. A shed load of the distro is written in 2.3. An upgrade would seem to be difficult and dangerous.
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