[fedora-india] Re: Virtualization for Beginner

[Aanjhan R]

> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 8:00 AM, das <das at randomink.org> wrote:
>> Earlier, I installed more than one Linux on the HD just for getting
>> some suggestion when someone is in problem. Gradually, due to the UUID
>> and all this is becoming problemsome. One brute way out is to rewrite
>> 'fstab' with device-names in place of UUID-s. But people say these
>> days a lot of applications read the UUID-s, so this may get
>> problemsome.

Yes. Really a pain! One of the fsck will fail and you have to exit
maintainer mode by pressing 'Ctrl + D' manually to continue the boot
process.

>> So, after some friends suggested, I now want to go into
>> virtualization. And I know nothing. I have a really huge amount of HD
>> space, and 4GB memory. And my CPU has the virtualization flags. I am
>> myself using Fedora 11 Beta and I want to have virtual installations
>> of Ubuntu and OpenSuse on my system.

Nice! If your CPU has virtualisation flags I strongly recommend
KVM/Qemu. I have been using it for quite sometime for Windows related
tasks and also trying out "bleeding edge" distros.

Some nice Howto Links below: (some are Ubuntu links)
[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/Installation
[2] http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/Installing_and_Configuring_Fedora_KVM_Virtualization
[3] bonzoli.com/docs/How_to_setup_Qemu_on_Fedora_8.pdf
[4] http://wiki.frugalware.org/index.php?title=QEMU_Quickstart

All you need to look into is the following

Step 1 : Install KVM/Qemu
Step 2 : Create a blan Qemu image using qemu-img command
Step 3 : Boot the Ubuntu Live CD using qemu/kvm , mentioning the hard
disk to be the image file we created in Step 2 (there is a switch to
mention that. its -c) . Make sure you boot from cdrom (i.e. -boot flag
is set to d) (man qemu has detailed descriptions)
Step 4 : Install :-) and enjoy

HTH
Aanjhan