It's my first serious attempt to dive into the *nix world and hence I wanted to make the transition as painless as possible.

Browsing the web I found that the easiest and harmless combination would be using a virtual machine. This way, I would not be creating a physical linux partition. Hence less risk on my side.

Of course it is not as good as running a live linux, but if run in full-screen mode there's no way to differentiate the virtual from the real one.

... somehting like jumping into the matrix :) Work for an hour on your guest linux OS and I bet you'll forget that you're running on a windows host OS.

If you bear with me and follow the steps I do, you'll understand me better.

1. Get VMWare Player

The first thing is setting up a virtual machine. You can get the free VMWare player
(or purchase the VMWare server, however the free viewer is adequate for our purposes)

2. Get a virtual machine

I strongly suggest you get the virtual machine from a torrent. Torrents are way too faster than FTP downloads and if your connection is good enough you can get your linux virtual machine in less than a day.

You may use this torrent (there are more on the site as well) .
Of course, you need to set up something that understands torrents.
Here is the best torrent manager I've ever seen.

As an alternative, you can download the actual installation DVD image. However this time you will need VMWare Server (which is not free) to run your linux.

3. Run your virtual machine and set it up

That's the easy part. After the torrent downloads, you unzip the contents of it and open it with VMWare Player and Voila your linux is ready in minutes!

Here is a screenshot after changing bits and pieces of it.



I was even able to connect to the internet. I installed postgreSQL and a graphical client for it. So far so good.
However I could not manage to increase the scren resolution larger than 800*600 px.

So I thought some way around. If I could run VNC server on my virtual machine then I could connect to it with as high resolution as I wish.

Though if you're working with linux (and unix for that matter) setting up things most of the time requires editing tons of config data. And my case was not an exception.

Here is how I managed to run VNC Server on my Fedora core 5 linux and connect to it from my windows Host OS.

4. Install VNC Viever

Download and install VNC viewer for your windows OS If you have not done already.

5. Set up guest OS for VNC connection

Well, that's a bit tricky since you will need to edit certain files.

First make sure you have VNC Server installed

# rpm -q vnc vnc-server
vnc package not installed
vnc-server-4.1.1-36

That means, I don't have VNC Viewer installed. But I have a VNC server.

Well, having a server is good enough for me. Since I will be using the viewer on windows to connect to my linux.

Since we will be editing some config data, it would be good to stop the VNC server if its already running.

#sudo /sbin/service vncserver stop

Now let us edit /etc/sysconfig/vncservers

But before that, make sure your file browser is set up to view hidden files.
This can be done through computer - file system - view - show hidden files from the GUI.

Going back to vncservers:

...snipped...
#User "-localhost" to prevent remote VNC clients...
...snipped...

VNCSERVERS="1:root"
# VNCSERVERARGS[1]="-geometry ... snipped ...
VNCSERVERARGS[1]="-geometry 1280x1024

The highlighted parts were commented out in the original file.
I removed no-listen and no-httpd from the arguments to be able to log in outside the local network from my windows OS.

But that was not enough. I needed to open etc/sysconfig/iptables as well to add the following line:

...snipped...

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp
--dport 80 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp
--dport 5901 -j ACCEPT
...snipped...

Tbe highlighted rule is newly added by me. That line simply opens port 5901 to the outside world so that the server may accept VNC requests coming from outside.

And one final thing was to allow the following lines in ~/.vnc

unset SESSION_MANAGER
exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

Now let us set a password:

#vncpasswd

And after doing all these it will be good to restart the VNC service and network configuration:

#sudo /sbin/service iptables restart
#sudo /sbin/service vncserver stop
#sudo /sbin/service vncserver start

And here we go!

All we need to do is open VNC Viewer from our windows OS and log in
giving the virtual server's IP and port number
(it is 10.0.0.6:5901 for my setup)

Enjoy your Fedora with full resolution.

... and now its time to roll some RoR in Fedora.

Cheers!

 bu yaziyi sevdin mi?  hemen una ekle!