How to enable the graphical boot Plymouth on Fedora 10

Hi guys,
few days ago I wrote a little guide to help people install VMware Tools on your brand new Fedora 10 installed through VMware Fusion (actually the same instructions are valid for VMware Player and VMware Workstation too) and now I am here again to report some other tips.

At the moment I am still configuring my Fedora-box to fit my habits and I am obviously tweaking the user interface too.

Booting your Fedora-box you surely saw an ugly blue/light-blue/white scrolling bar, in order to see the graphical boot you need to edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst (actually a symbolic link to /boot/grub/grub.conf) adding the right configuration that fits your video card and your screen resolution.

Let's start, open a Terminal window, elevate your permission with the su command and type gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst. Modify this chunk of the configuration file adding the text in bold (actually you need to add the same text to every boot entry):

title Fedora (2.6.27.21-170.2.56.fc10.x86_64)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.21-170.2.56.fc10.x86_64 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet vga=792
initrd /initrd-2.6.27.21-170.2.56.fc10.x86_64.img

With vga=792 you’re saying that the screen resolution is 1024x768 and colors are 24-bit deep (to find the right VESA mode take a look at this page).


Enjoy the graphical boot.
See you

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Install Fedora 10 through VMware Fusion 2.0

Hi guys, lots of time passed since I posted on this blog so, here I come.

Just like my friends matteo, tciddanniw and wisher I have lots of stuff to do including university courses’ projects. In order to develop some of them I need to run Linux and as you probably know I am a Mac OS X user so, having only a single notebook, I need to run some virtual machines in order to accomplish my tasks (I don’t consider dual-boot - or worse triple-boot - as a solution, just like my friend wisher).

This time I’m going to use Fedora 10 so, let’s start. First of all, what we need?

• Mac OS X 10.5;
• VMware Fusion 2.0.4 (this version corrects a pretty serious security issue);
• Fedora 10.

In contrast with Ubuntu, VMware Fusion doesn’t have a predefined profile for Fedora so you have to choose one; I chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 64-bit (because I’m using Fedora 10 x86-64, choose the profile according to the architecture you chose to use). Now you can modify the profile of the virtual machine as you like (I assigned 2 virtual cores, reserved 512 MB of RAM and created an incremental SCSI hard disk of 64 GB).

Now you can boot the virtual machine and install the operating system just like you would do if you’re dealing with a real machine; the installation is straightforward and I don’t think you need my directions. When the installation is completed I recommend you to fully update the operating system (if you are installing Fedora 10 right now you need patience due to the pretty high amount of updates available).

The installation of the VMware Tools is the most tricky part, anyway it is still simple. First of all you need some packages to build VMware Tools so, open a Terminal windows, elevate your permission with the su command and then type:

yum install gcc make kernel-devel

I advise you not to close the Terminal window, you will need it in a few seconds. Select Install VMware Tools from Virtual Machine menu, a mounted DVD should appear on your desktop, double-click on it to enter and then copy the archive containing VMware Tools (if you're using VMware Fusion 2.0.4 the archive name is VMwareTools-7.9.3-159196.tar.gz) on a local folder such as ~/Downloads. Unpack VMware Tools (either using the Terminal or the Graphical User Interface) and get to the resulting folder using the Terminal window you used before (which should be an elevated Terminal). To install VMware Tools you need to type:

./vmware-install.pl

answer yes to all questions except for the one that talls: “The configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf can not be found. Do you want to create a new one? (yes/no) [yes]” here you have to answer no because Fedora 10 doesn't use the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to store X's configuration.

When the installation finished you only have to restart the virtual machine and enjoy your virtualized operating system.

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