Installing VPC 2007 / Ubuntu 9.04

2012-03-18 by

When I started this venture I thought, this will be easy.  Come to find out it is not as easy as it looks.  Based on the version of Host OS and Virtual PC you are running, the install has different ways it can go.

I was able to install directly on a Vista 32 bit host by using the onscreen menus and instructions.  No problems there with Virtual PC.  However when attempting to port that over to a Windows 7 64 bit machine with VPC 2007, things became trickier.

I searched the internet and found many articles and many ways to install older versions.  I used these websites to install the newest version and after hours of struggling it finally worked.  Below are the steps to install Ubuntu 9.04 in VPC 2007 SP1.  I followed many of the steps from different blog entries from this site http://arcanecode.com/2008/04/24/installing-ubuntu-804-under-microsoft-virtual-pc-2007/.

  1. Build a base hard drive with no OS
  2. Mount the Ubuntu 9.04 Image
  3. Choose English
  4. Press F4 and Change Graphics Mode to Safe mode
  5. While on the Try Ubuntu (First Option) Press F6
  6. Escape out of the gray popup menu
  7. Use the key pad to edit the command line below the menu option
  8.         Delete the options quiet splash and add in its place noreplace-paravirt
  9.         Delete the trailing spaces
  10. Boot up from Try menu - This can take up to 10 minutes mine was about 4 minutes
  11. Choose install from the desktop
  12. Restart the VM

 

There are also some tricks about boot up that I have followed.  By editing the menu.lst file, you can add this option as well to the default menu settings.  Before doing that though I would let Ubuntu do its updates (this takes about 1 hour) as it will give you new menu options that you will need to add this to as well.

Now that this is finally installed I am on to trying to use Mono to write windows programs that can run on Linux in Visual Studio .NET 2008 and using the .NET framework and Mono C# compilers.

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