howto:Go Virtually

Original post at : http://iahmyi.blogspot.com/2010/12/howtogo-virtually.html

Have you ever got the feeling that changing OS can sometimes jeopardize your system using right now?

How can you run many os on your computer? Lets say you ain't familiar with Linux and you want to experiment on it. Does this mean format? Well, the answer is no. You can run many OS without even touching your current system. The way to use it is via virtualization. There are many softwares available for such  purpose. The most common users tend to use is VMWare, VirtualBox, Qemu and many more.

I will show how to install a virtual machine using Fedora release 14.

Firstly, install your virtual machine into your system. Here I will show how to install the virtualbox virtualization. You can get more information on different operating systems at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. If you are using Fedora release Linux Distro then here is how to install it.

p/s: Before you do anything, be sure that DKMS is install. Dynamic Kernel Module Support or DKMS for short is used to generate modules outside the kernel source.

There are 2 ways. One direct installation via rpm and two via yum.

Via rpm

Firstly, go to http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads and select your release. Let say you are using Fedora release 14 x64 as I am.  At a part "Fedora 14 ("Laughlin") i386 | AMD64" follow the AMD64 link. Once download, either you click on it for packagekit to install it or using terminal, do this

rpm -ivh <location of file> in my case like this

rpm -ivh /home/ahmyi/Downloads/linux/rpm/VirtualBox-3.2-3.2.12_68302_fedora14-1.x86_64.rpm

You should be in root to do the installation. Either by doing sudo or su.

Via Yum

Now the second step is via yum. To do this you ought to have the virtualbox repo inserted. This is step is either by downloading the repo and placed it at /etc/yum.repos.d/<repo name>.repo via root or through terminal. In terminal mode do this as root via sudo or su.


wget -P/etc/yum.repos.d http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo

Now you can use yum install VirtualBox command to install the package or by your PackageKit.

Now how to use it, once you've open up your virtual machine manager as below picture, you can install various operating systems. I got a few os listed as below.

To create a virtual machine is by clicking the new icon on the top left hand corner. By the way, you have to have a disk for installation, via image or burned, just like installing in a real pc.