Conrad Agramont's WebLog

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Redhat on Virtual PC/Virtual Server

I'm not known for my deep technical skills and posts on Redhat/Linux, but I was working on something and thought I should provide a post.

On a project that we're doing some Proof of Concepting on, we are going to migrate content from a Non-Windows environment (in this case RedHat/Linux) to a Windows 2003 environment.  This is only part of the project, but an important one.  So I thought I'd use Virtual Server to host my Redhat installation.  I know it's not supported, but I had to try anyways.  Well the entire installation went pretty well.  I followed the GUI based installation provided by RedHat 9.0 and everything worked well.  Now for the bad part.

After the Virtual Machine rebooted after the installation, I could see the boot up process that is typical in Linux, but at the end of it I got a weird display.  At this point, I got a "Black Screen" with some weird "haze" that appeared to be a hard to see version of the UI.  I could see my mouse cursor moving around and could even make out a few icons.  But it was so hard to see and I couldn't read anything!  So reinstalled it and thought perhaps I chose the wrong device driver.  Nope, that wasn't it either.

The solution was VERY simple.  I found out that in order for this to work, you needed to set the Display to 16-bit in order for the display to "work."  Once that was done, all was good.  It's weird that I didn't find more information on this on the web.  Perhaps I just didn't read the documentation correctly, I'm doing the wrong searches via Google/MSN, not many people are installing Redhat on Virtual Server/PC, or something else.

Here are some sites that helped me out:

Comments

Mark A. Richman said:

I've done the same thing with Debian with some success.
# February 3, 2005 9:14 AM

Benson said:

Thanks so much for solving my problem (it was such a simple solution, I would have never gotten it!!!) I too looked around the web and had a tough time finding a soloution.
# February 16, 2005 2:41 PM
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