install ubuntu 9.10 on Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac

You could try to wait for it, but if it takes 90-95% CPU usage, it
might just freeze.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 6:52 PM, magicjoe
<email address hidden> wrote:
> New question #102069 on Ubuntu:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/102069
>
> ok, i have an ibook G4 running Mac OSX 10.4.11.  I installed Microsoft Virtual PC 7.0.3 on it.  I have the .iso image for ubuntu 9.10.  I have already installed a virtual Win XP machine on the Mac using Virtual PC, and it was successful.  When I attempt to set up the ubuntu virtual machine, i get to the orange desktop screen but without the task bar at the top or bottom.  If I open activity monitor on the mac, I can see the process "Virtual PC" is using 90-95% CPU.
>
> My question is, does that mean i should keep waiting, and it will eventually successfully install? Or is all hope lost?
>
> Please also send any comments/suggestion/replies here to <email address hidden>
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Ubuntu.
>

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Regards,
Sonny Dhillon

Hi :)

So the MicroSoft Virtual Machine is allowing Windows to install easily but creating problems for a rival OS?

Have you tried any other virtual machines such as Virtualbox?
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

It is unclear from your question but you aren't trying to install Ubuntu inside Windows inside a virtual machine on a Mac are you? You could probably cut a few middle layers there by trying to bootup the machine straight from an Ubuntu Cd in the cd/dvd-drive although i am not sure about the Mac bootstrap process.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

to clarify, NO i am not trying to install linux on a virtual windows. If this goes as well, i will have a mac, running virtual pc, with a virtual win xp environment, and a virtual ubuntu 9.10 environment. so far, it has been installing from the .iso into virtual box for just under 11 hours. it has written 1.72GB of data. Activity Monitor shows it still processing the install, so im letting it do its thing. in the ubuntu virtual machine window, i have the orange desktop with the gradient color and the swirly vertical stripe. no task bars yet. haven't even entered a password or a user name for it.

in activity monitor i see kernel_task, Window Server, Virtual PC, and a few other items pop in and leave at random. 64121 reads in, and 30733 writes out. its working.......just V E R Y S L O W LY. at least as far as i can tell. does virtualbox work on osx 10.4.11? and if so, is it FREE?

to clarify, NO i am not trying to install linux on a virtual windows. If this goes as well, i will have a mac, running virtual pc, with a virtual win xp environment, and a virtual ubuntu 9.10 environment. so far, it has been installing from the .iso into virtual box for just under 11 hours. it has written 1.72GB of data. Activity Monitor shows it still processing the install, so im letting it do its thing. in the ubuntu virtual machine window, i have the orange desktop with the gradient color and the swirly vertical stripe. no task bars yet. haven't even entered a password or a user name for it.

in activity monitor i see kernel_task, Window Server, Virtual PC, and a few other items pop in and leave at random. 64121 reads in, and 30733 writes out. its working.......just V E R Y S L O W LY. at least as far as i can tell. does virtualbox work on osx 10.4.11? and if so, is it FREE?

Hi :)

Yes, VirtualBox is Free and it doesn't cost anything either. From the VirtualBox website i thought i noticed a Mac OS 10 version but as you can tell i am not familiar with Macs. Although i think they are seriously impressive from what i hear.
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

There is something seriously wrong if an Ubuntu install has taken over 1 hour. For the virtual machine are the specs above

900Mhz cpu speed
1Gb ram
15Gb hard-drive space?

In order to run the Mac OS the real machine's specs are going to have to be a huge amount higher. If you closed the Windows virtual machine down then that might allow the Ubuntu machine to have it's proper allocation of your real machine's resources.

Does the virtual machine allow you to have a virtual cd-drive that could read the Ubuntu iso file as tho it was a cd? If so it might be worth trying to run a "LiveCd session" on the virtual machine
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

Sorry i don't feel like i am helping much here. Hopefully someone else might be able to help better. Have you tried posting your question into
http://www.linuxquestions.org
and found ubuntuforums too? Hopefully you might get faster better ansewrs by posting to a few places and then share around the link to the right answer into the other 2 to spread the knowledge.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

one more thing i forgot to mention..........my ibook g4 is a ppc. so virtual
box won't work, its only for intel based macs. any other suggestions? lol.
thanks though Tom.

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Tom
<email address hidden>wrote:

> Your question #102069 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/102069
>
> Tom posted a new comment:
> Hi :)
>
> Yes, VirtualBox is Free and it doesn't cost anything either. From the
> VirtualBox website i thought i noticed a Mac OS 10 version but as you can
> tell i am not familiar with Macs. Although i think they are seriously
> impressive from what i hear.
> http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
>
> There is something seriously wrong if an Ubuntu install has taken over 1
> hour. For the virtual machine are the specs above
>
> 900Mhz cpu speed
> 1Gb ram
> 15Gb hard-drive space?
>
> In order to run the Mac OS the real machine's specs are going to have to
> be a huge amount higher. If you closed the Windows virtual machine down
> then that might allow the Ubuntu machine to have it's proper allocation
> of your real machine's resources.
>
> Does the virtual machine allow you to have a virtual cd-drive that could
> read the Ubuntu iso file as tho it was a cd? If so it might be worth trying
> to run a "LiveCd session" on the virtual machine
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD
>
> Sorry i don't feel like i am helping much here. Hopefully someone else
> might be able to help better. Have you tried posting your question into
> http://www.linuxquestions.org
> and found ubuntuforums too? Hopefully you might get faster better ansewrs
> by posting to a few places and then share around the link to the right
> answer into the other 2 to spread the knowledge.
>
> Good luck and regards from
> Tom :)
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are a direct
> subscriber of the question.
>

Hi :)

Ooops, sorry to hear about that. I think the basic problem is that running a lot of virtual machines is going to be a big drain on computer resources. Also relying on a MicroSquish product to provide a layer between 2 rival OS's is just asking for trouble. MicroSquish rarely co-operates with even 1 rival as it cannot handle the competition. However linux & Mac are both Unix based so we are in the same family as each other and usually co-operate well.

I know it's not exactly what you had planned but i think it's worth trying another route for a little while before returning to the virtual machines idea.

Please can you try running Ubuntu as a LiveCd session on the real machine.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD
Hopefully if we can get something like this working then we can work out what might be going wrong in the virtual machine.

Errr i am not sure but this link might provide some clues too
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwitchingToUbuntu/FromMacOSX

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Ok, so i did a little research. and i now have the virtual ubuntu installed on the ibook G4, PPC processor, running OSX 10.4.11. the virtualization software is microsoft Virtual PC, which is discontiunued. The problem I had to solve with the slow installation was the fact that the virtualization software only allotted a default of 255mb RAM. I increased it to the max of 512, and the install went through.

NOW, the issue i am having is getting ubuntu to respond to the commands of the ibook mouse pad. i navigated the final install commands with arrow keys and enter button.

Any suggestions on how to configure ubuntu to recognize the mouse pad as a mouse?

Worst case, ill have to purchase a USB mouse.

Just for anyone out there without a bankroll to afford a top of the line laptop, or PC...........this virtualization software is not bad, even though it is discontinued. If enough G4 PPC users WANT this, microsoft COULD possible pick up the project, even minor support and development is better than NOTHING.

One more thing........now that the install is hung up at 15% at the phase "detecting file systems" I just found that there is an .iso image of ubuntu 9.10 FOR PPC!!!!! why was i not informed of this? lol.

anyhow, i think i will try to install a virtual environment using THIS .iso, and if my logic is correct, the mac will not have such a conflict with emulating everything into intel commands for the processor.

i don't think that microsoft's product was the issue here, i think it was the iso being i386 and not PPC.........but that's not to say that microsoft isn't CRAP anyway lol. (hence the MAC and desire for Ubuntu)

Hi :)

WOW!! there's an edition aimed at ppc?!?! Please give me a link! Sorry i didn't know about that (because it would have helped me solve a lot of problems over this last year). 512Mb ram is NOT enough for Ubuntu. I am sure your real machine has more than that. I would guess you have about 1Gb ram for real? A LiveCd would have worked superbly with that.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

Xubuntu is Ubuntu using a lighter-weight DE and various apps have been switched for lighter-weight ones so it should find 512Mb is more than enough. I haven't checked the min.specs tho.
http://www.xubuntu.org/

Another alternative is to install a lighter-weight DE into Ubuntu and see if your mouse magically works after that. Alt F2 should bring up a command-line but typing

gnome-terminal

should bring up a proper terminal console. Into that try typing

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

which should bring in all the Xubuntu packages and the Xfce DE which is much lighter-weight than the very heavy Gnome's DE. However it will also bring in packages such as AbiWord. So it might be worth NOT installing the Xubuntu one but instead skip to my next suggestions. A much lighter-weight DE well worth trying is "lxde" so try

sudo apt-get install lxde

Also e16, also known as "enlightenment", is an excellent DE well worth trying. Once you have found a good usable DE then you might need to uninstall a few things. Hmmm, to be honest it might be worth skipping the Xubuntu one to avoid getting all those extra packages.

At a login screen you should get an "Options" button that will allow you to change the session-type to try out the different DE's. Sometimes you might find yo just need to right-click on the desktop to bring up the LogOut button.

My experience with MicroSquish products is that they are just about ok by the time support is discontinued. Usuually they seem to release products that are more like alpha or beta releases and then get people to buy that off them. However i am sure that Windows7 is different & doesn't have any of the problems previous releases had
http://movies.apple.com/media/us/mac/getamac/2009/apple-mvp-broken_promises-us-20091022_480x272.mov
Mac is expensive, or more accurately it costs a lot BUT it is good value for money.

Using a MicroSquish product feels a bit like tying your hands behind your back and then complaining that paint-brushes don't work properly when you try to paint. Product "rope" works so it's obviously a problem with the paint-brush that is preventing you from painting properly.

The standard Ubuntu seems to work fine on most Macs but obviously finding one that nudges the odds in favour of Mac is going to help a lot.

Ok, hopefully we are getting somewhere a bit faster now! It's certainly been interesting so far and i am glad you have tried this out :)
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

updating my progress........so the ppc iso didn't work. my assumptions were wrong. apparently vpc 7 for mac is an emulator for intel processors, therefore will only work with intel iso's. furthermore, since vpc 7 is older, it does not support ext4 file systems.

i like ubuntu.......but really i just need a distro of linux that will run compiz fusion. i do not plan for the linux on my mac ibook to even be functional for anything BUT showing off the eye candy of linux. yeah, im just doing it for the looks and to be able to say "hey look what my computer can do, its a mac, but i have windows, and look at THIS, linux, see the 3d desktop cube, oh and the burn effect" .....so sue me, lol.

i have ubuntu 5.10 that i will try next, but im going to experiment with debian 5.04 first.

thanks to anyone who has and does reply here. i know it seems like a mundane issue, but to ME its important. i know what i want to achieve IS possible, its just a matter of dinking with it.

any suggestions for a minimal distro of any kind of linux that will run on an emulated intel processor and which can make use of the visual effects of compiz fusion would be helpful, as i am sorting through all the various types of linux experimenting to find what works.

also, if i had an older ubuntu, like 5.10 and it worked, will the repositories in synaptic be the latest by default? how does that work? will i be able to see the latest packages?

im unfamiliar with adding apt keys and where to get them. i have done a few "apt-get" CL installs before. Just never added repositories.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/9.10/release/

thats where i got this tom.

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 5:32 PM, magicjoe <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Your question #102069 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/102069
>
> Status: Answered => Open
>
> You are still having a problem:
> updating my progress........so the ppc iso didn't work. my assumptions
> were wrong. apparently vpc 7 for mac is an emulator for intel
> processors, therefore will only work with intel iso's. furthermore,
> since vpc 7 is older, it does not support ext4 file systems.
>
> i like ubuntu.......but really i just need a distro of linux that will
> run compiz fusion. i do not plan for the linux on my mac ibook to even
> be functional for anything BUT showing off the eye candy of linux.
> yeah, im just doing it for the looks and to be able to say "hey look
> what my computer can do, its a mac, but i have windows, and look at
> THIS, linux, see the 3d desktop cube, oh and the burn effect" .....so
> sue me, lol.
>
> i have ubuntu 5.10 that i will try next, but im going to experiment with
> debian 5.04 first.
>
> thanks to anyone who has and does reply here. i know it seems like a
> mundane issue, but to ME its important. i know what i want to achieve IS
> possible, its just a matter of dinking with it.
>
> any suggestions for a minimal distro of any kind of linux that will run
> on an emulated intel processor and which can make use of the visual
> effects of compiz fusion would be helpful, as i am sorting through all
> the various types of linux experimenting to find what works.
>
> also, if i had an older ubuntu, like 5.10 and it worked, will the
> repositories in synaptic be the latest by default? how does that work?
> will i be able to see the latest packages?
>
> im unfamiliar with adding apt keys and where to get them. i have done a
> few "apt-get" CL installs before. Just never added repositories.
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are a direct
> subscriber of the question.
>

Thanks Tom, that solved my question.

Superb, thx MagicJoe :))

I would be interested to know which distro you do finally settle with but this is meant to be an Ubuntu-only forum so if you forget or don't have time then really don't worry about it.

Yesterday i forgot to post a link to the general linux forum that might be able to answer this question much better
http://www.linuxquestions.org
but i see i already sent that link ages ago so i guess it's all good :)

Thanks and regards from
Tom :)

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