I’d love to ditch XP completely, but I still have a few things that I need windows for. My master plan is to run FC5 as the primary OS and use XP in a Parallels virtual machine. I’ve messed around with Parallels before on ancient history PC hardware (400MHz PIII, 384Mb) and found it pretty impressive. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will be pretty snappy on my newer (but not brand new…) 2.8Ghz 1Gb machine.
FC5 doesn’t happen to be on the Parallels supported host OS list. But, I’ve conquered that problem before. All it took on my last attempt was using yum to grab kernel source (and update QT, I think) and using rpm with some arguments to skip some spurious dependencies.
I tried the same recipe again on this new FC5 install and ran into some problems. First, I couldn’t remember the exact yum command line to grab the kernel source. I thought I had a bookmark for some details along these lines, but I couldn’t track it down either. After some fervent Googling, and messing around, I figured out that the yum already grabbed the kernel source I wanted, but it was the latest version and not the stuff for the older kernel I was actually running (I can probably elaborate on the versions, if any one actually cares).
So, I yum updated the kernel. That was pretty straight forward. I restarted and picked the new kernel option. Nuts, it appears to go down in flames about 10 lines in to the boot process. Something about ata1 not responding. My guess is that some other kernel related dependencies are now out of whack. So, I reboot back into the old kernel and do the mother update ‘yum update’. Yikes, 929Mb of stuff to download. Gonna let that one go over night.
I checked in this morning and the update completed successfully; that’s pretty impressive in it self. I can’t recall ever updating that much at one time and not having something minor blow up along the way. So, I restarted again and picked the new kernel option.
Grr. Same ata1 not responding message. I walked away from the computer for a few minutes and was pleasantly surprised to see the Fedora login page when I returned. Guess it was a recoverable time out issue, despite all the scary messages.
As my last action in this session, I ran the parallels config script again. This time, it find the kernel source no problem and went on about its merry way compiling.
This evening, I’ll finish setting it and try to get XP installed. I’m sure that it’ll be another 4 hour affair. But, as soon as I get it up to date, I’m gonna burn its associated virtual machine file to dvd. So, in the future, I don’t need to reinstall from scratch. That’ll be heaven if I work out all the details…
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