Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Virtualbox and Oracle Enterprise Linux

I recently tried to get Oracle Enterprise Linux running in a virtualbox on my mac. The installation of Oracle Enterprise Linux is no problem, however, when you try to do a first boot the systems comes up and never passes beyond the point of:

Uncompressing Linux.... 0k, booting the kernel

The problem is that virtualbox is incapable of handling some of the SMP kernel options when you start the kernel. Currently a bug is reported at Sun to fix the problem. A workarround for this problem is to boot the Enterprise-up (2.6.9-78.0.0.0.1.EL) kernel instead of the Enterprise (2.6.9-78.0.0.0.1.ELsmp) kernel.

It is not the best workarround but you can get a OEL system running in a virtualbox. When you like to default the system to start with this kernel you have to edit the file /boot/grub/grub.conf and change the default=0 to default=1. In my case the 1 is the Enterprise-up (2.6.9-78.0.0.0.1.EL) kernel which can start with virtualbox.




8 comments:

Narendra said...

John,

Even I tried to install Oracle Enterprise Linux on Virtualbox on WIndows Vista. While the installation was completed successfully, I am not able to get past the initial login screen on startup. After entering password (and pressing ENTER), only a blank screen appears.
Any idea, what can be the issue ?

Johan Louwers said...

Hi Narendra,
what you might try is to press Alt+Ctrl+F1 when you have the blank screen to get to the command line. Here you might have a look in /var/log/messages to check what the problem might be.

please tell me if this helps, else do send me a e-mail at suntac {at} dds.nl

Regards,
Johan Louwers.

Narendra said...

John,

Thanks for your reply.
It seems I have managed to solve (??) the issue. I just deleted the virtual machine and created a new one, this time with "OS Type" as "Red Hat", instead of "Linux 2.6" which I had mentioned earlier. The subsequent installtion went smoothly and now I can access GUI version of Oracle Enterprise Linux in my Virtual Machine.
However, I still have one issue. My Virtual machine's display is limited to 800x600 resolution and the Virtual Machine "display screen" can not occupy entire laptop screen. It just occupies a some portion in the centre, irrespective of whether I use "Window Mode" or "Full Screen Mode" in the Virtual Box.
Can you please help me in this ?

Johan Louwers said...

Hi Narendra,
did you install the guest additions? If you have your guest running click on "Install Guest additions", you can find it under Devices.

When you click it a mount will be created, here you can start the installer. This will install the guest additions and this will also make that your screen resolution will be set correctly.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Johan Louwers.

Narendra said...

Johan,

Thanks for your advice.
I did install guest additions. I can now use my mouse in and out of VM without using the host key. But still, I am not able to get higher resolutions in VM. Incidently, when I checked "System->Administration->Display", the video card shows as "Unknown Video card". Maybe that is the reason. Trying to select any of the video cards from "Configure..." button, does not appear to have any effect on the video card recognition or display.
Any idea what can be the issue ?

Madhu Sudhan said...

Hi John,

I have exactly the same problem as Narendra is facing except that i have installed OEL 5.3 on VMware. The mouse pointer gets stuck while in the virtual machine and also the resolution is not big enough for me to see the Next button of OUI (runInstaller ). Please advise.

thanks,
Madhu

Obi said...

Hello Everybody,
I am also running Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 on Virtualbox on Windows Vista. Installation/everything went smoothly and it is even running smoother than Ubuntu 9.04 which was lagging (so slow). No network issue or whatsoever. The only problem is, just like Narendra said, no fullscreen. I've installed the guest additions, changed the screen resolution and all but still no effect. Could this be an Oracle Linux problem or what?

Johan Louwers said...

Hi,
you might want to have a look at this post I wrote on the subject: post link