[SoaS] Blueberry ISO to VirtualBox VM zyx-liveinstaller success

[Gary C Martin]

Hi folks,

I ran into some awkward issues using Wade's experimental vmdk, so needed to go back to the original Blueberry ISO and install/work from there. So, just wanted to report success using the zyx-liveinstaller to install to a VirtualBox VM from the Blueberry ISO :-)

Rough steps are:

1) In VirtualBox create a new Fedora type VM and allocate it a new 4Gb disk

2) In the VMs settings, add the Blueberry ISO file to mount as a CD ROM disk

3) Configured some other non-essential VB settings while I'm here. [can post later if folks are interested]

4) Start the VM, it'll boot into the Blueberry CD ROM (the ISO file)

5) Once in Sugar, start Terminal and "sudo zyx-liveinstaller"

6) Click the button to start gparted (a partition editor)

7) You should see the 4Gb unallocated disk. I decided to play it safe and stick with ~convention, after some fiddling with the gparted UI I created a 100Mb boot partition, 512Mb swap partition, and the remaining 3+Gb as the root partition. Apply the changed and quit gparted.

8) Step through the zyx-liveinstaller screens pointing it at your partitions. You'll see something like sda for the whole disk, and then sda1, sda2, sda3 for the partitions you just created (doesn't show the partition labels so remember the order you created them in).

9) Once the install is complete, as a sanity check, shutdown Sugar and go back to VirtualBox. Under the settings for the VM, un-check the option to mount the ISO as a CD ROM, and start the VM again. It should boot up just as before, only this time it's booting off the real install instead of just the Live CD.

...optional Sugar/Linux tweaks for using a large view of Sugar...

10) Back in Sugar, launch Terminal again, "vi .Xresources" and edit the dpi, the default of 150 text is too large for me, 133 seems right for my screen, a setting of 100 is perhaps about right for 1024x768.

11) "sudo vi /boot/grub/grub.conf" and add a vga parameter to the kernel line. I'm currently using "vga=0x345" here on my MacBook Pro for a 1280x1024 VM window. VirtualBox lists a whole bunch of modes; "vga=0x347" would set a 1600x1200 window; "vga=0x344" would set a 1024x768. [FWIW: these numbers are all for 32bit depth, I haven't experimented with 24bit or lower, see attached screen shot for other modes VB listed for my Mac]

12) "sudo vi /usr/bin/sugar" it's a dirty hack, but look for the line "export SUGAR_SCALING=72", this is a GTK widget thing and you only have two choices, 72 or 100. To my Sugar eye, 72 feels about the right proportions in an 800x600 window (maybe upto 1024x768); above that I'd go for the value of 100. To make the change, add a new line (just below the if/fi block) "export SUGAR_SCALING=100" [Question: any one know where I should really be setting this parameter?]

13) Now we need another hack so that X uses our large vga setting, first type "sudo Xorg -configure :1", this makes X generate a xorg.conf.new file (F12/F11 don't ship with any xorg.conf so I have no idea how they define a display resolution), and then copy it to the default location "sudo cp xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf"

14) All done! Shutdown Sugar and start it up again for the full effect :-)

Regards,
--Gary

P.S. Hey, and after all this, you finally get to see the pretty boot animation!! Considering I generated the images it's nice to finally see them in place :-b

P.P.S Here's the screen grab of the VirtualBox vga mode settings:

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