Today I tried to install Linux as a guest OS on Windows Virtual PC. I got Fedora Core 2 late last year during a training. So that is what I tried.

I picked “Other” OS and created a new virtual disk. Installation started and I picked Graphic mode installation. The Anaconda hardware probing processing started. After it dected the monitor, mouse, it then tried to start the X. At this point, the process failed. Below is the error message I got:

An internal virtual machine error (13) has occured. The virtual machine will reset now.

So I started the text installation mode. And I picked Personal Desktop as the image I’d like to install. Most of the rest of the customization stuff were left as default.

The install seemed to take forever. It did finish finally but when it is time to start Fedora Core 2 Linux, it was never successful. Below is the sample of error messages I got:

Checksum for device 1 is not valid
Unsupported Intel Chipset
/etc/X11/perfdm: line 80: 317 Segmentation fault unicode_start $SYSFONT $SYSFONTACM

INIT: Id “x” respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

So I figured the problem maybe caused by X and graphic stuff. I then reinstalled without X, gnome, kdesktop and all that. The install was successful, and Linux can be started.

However, when I login as root and issue commands, I periodically got Segmentation Error and the system is not stable. When I try to open or write a file in vi, I got E212: Can’t open file for writing. So essentially, it is useless.

Alas, Cygwin is much easier. But the good thing I found is that mutt seems to be included by default in Fedora.