Richard Naszcyniec's Blog

With the release of Oracle VM I just could not resist the temptation to install it on my old T43 laptop.  That model is a bit old using a Pentium chip which has caused a bit of a challenge.  The Oracle VM Server installed without any trouble booting from the ISO image I burned to disk.  It reformatted the machine prior to rebooting with no issue.  The Oracle VM Manager could not install on the laptop due to a missing RPM which seems to be expected based on the support forum.  No big deal I installed that on a VMWare image of Oracle Linux R4 Update 5.    Why?  Well I had to since the Oracle VM Manager only runs on Linux.

Anyway... once I started fooling around a bit I was ready to create my first virtual machine.  I figured this would be easier to use the 1 CPU hardware virtuallized guest template made available by Oracle.  Long story short, I can't use the hardware virtualization template since my CPU is so old!  That leaves me with trying to get a paravirtualized guest working which is not as easy as it sounds.  I am still intimidated by trying to convert a hardware virtualized template to a paravirtualized one.  That leaves me doing a manual install on the server or working with the VM manager.  Unfortunately I am not having luck creating a single DVD ISO of the R4 update 5 from the 4 CD ISO images you get from eDelivery whic is required.  It figures that Roxio Easy Media Creator suite is letting me down once again.  Not sure how I will work past this but that is what makes this tech dabbling fun.  I am looking forward to being able to switch between virtual images once this is done.  There are many times I want/need to have different configurations running depending on my current work.

Update 1/4/2008 - Turns out I didn't need to create my own image thanks to Oracle posting some paravirtualized images.  See the seperate news item on that.