The Wahyudiharto's Blog

On this series article of Aspire One (A110) – at least at current month continuously, I’d like to share you about my experience installing Fedora 7 guest on Windows XP Home host with VirtualBox. This might be a different one since I hadn’t tried before, moreover on netbook class. By the chance, I need to test about the virtualization performance on Atom processor running Linux system simultaneously. If you’d like to take a try your self, you must prepare VirtualBox software (I used 1.4.0 or download latest here), Fedora 7 ISO DVD (or others Linux image) and Nero ImageDrive (or your any virtual CD favorite application).

First, load the ISO image with virtual CD drive tools (I used Nero to load the ISO image).



Run VirtualBox & prepare the virtual hardware environments. In my test, I setting up with 384MB of RAM & 3GB fixed size of virtual hard disk.



Boot the machine & it will shows default welcome splash. Select the first menu; Install or upgrade an existing system.



Follow the on-screen wizard until you meet with hard drive partitioning window. Select Create custom layout & continue to Next button.



Divide the 3GB virtual hard disk with each configuration; root system (ext3) with 2753MB & swap file with 314MB or depends on your custom size.



As it default, leave the GRUB boot loader to be installed on this virtual hard disk. Click Next to continue.



Obviously, the network interface has been detected as Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] 79c970 [PCnet32 LANCE]. Give the interface with manual configuration IP address & similar with the host network class (I used 192.168.1.1 to host & 192.168.1.12 to guest).



Select your appropriate software with Customize now radio button or simply leave with it’s default selection value.



Installing files then established…



During this, the load of CPU usage was high. Every single task on host OS may decrease the speed of installing process.



Approximately, it took about 1:20 hours until the installation completed with office packages installed. Next, click Reboot button. Note that, the ISO image will ejected automatically during this screen.



System will now restarted, the live GRUB boot also appears.



Loading progress established with (very) low speed.



The great was, 2nd device – which was sound card – had recognized as 82801AA AC97 Audio Controller & currently using snd-intel8x0 module. A sound test clearly hear out from the speaker.



I tried to test the network connection (host with 192.168.1.1 and guest IP 192.168.1.12) & both of it was successfully responding. I pinging out guest from host, while I made an attempt to load the host share drives from guest OS.



Conclusion
Somehow, running Fedora 7 with VirtualBox on this netbook feels the same with running exactly Fedora 7 on Pentium III physically machine with 256MB of RAM. Everything has working but with slow-moving around. However, with all weaknesses, still I need this virtualization to test my web based application project on different OS (for example: Linux act as client) & browser capability environments.

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Fedora, Linux, VirtualBox

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