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Installing Drupal on Ubuntu Server on Virtual PC
I hope the title describes the objective clearly enough. There's a justification of my personal choice of technologies here.
There were quite a few hurdles along the way and I tripped over most of them, but I picked myself up, dusted myself down, went back and took a harder run up and now I have a lovely working system. Well actually, I found a couple of great blogs that covered different parts. It goes something like this:
Step 1 - Install Ubuntu on Virtual PC
Not completely straight forward because MS VPC is really designed to support MS operating systems, not Linux. Sometimes Linux works just fine, but Ubuntu Server 8.04 needed a helping hand.
First set up your new hard drive and configuration file in VPC. I gave it a 4GB hard drive and that's more than enough to start with. Of course, you can opt to make it expandable. The resultant working disk is just 1.3GB. 512MB RAM should be plenty and I'll update this as I learn more. For guest operating system select 'Other'. Now start your new VPC. OK, it doen't work yet because there's no data on the disk so...
Download the latest Ubuntu Server ISO file and capture it in VPC by clicking the CD symbol on the status bar or the CD option on the menu. Restart the VPC to boot from the ISO file and click in the window to be ready to hit escape when the boot menu countdown appears. At the menu hit F6 and add the following, without quotes, before the '--' characters: "vga=771 noreplace-paravirt "
Now, once you hit Enter, the installation process will start. Choose your language and keyboard, etc., but when you get to select the Packages to install just select Open SSH Server only. Continue, but when you get to the last stage where you're asked to remove the CD to reboot, HOLD IT! At this stage select Go Back and choose Launch Shell from the menu.
Once you have the command prompt type the following commands:
chroot /target /bin/bash
aptitude install linux-generic
aptitude remove linux-server linux-image-server linux-image-2.6.24-19-server linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24-19-server
[Note: the version numbers will probably have changed. I'll post how to find out the correct one when I figure out the best way. If you were watching the progress during the installation you would've seen it.]
exit
Now we have to edit the Grub menu to add the same options to the boot command that we did before:
nano /target/boot/grub/menu.lst
Look for the line that says: “title Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.xx-xx-generic” and then find the line starting 'kernel' below it. Add the same boot options to the end of so it looks like this:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.xx-xx-generic root=UUID-XXXXXXXXXXX ro quiet splash vga=771 noreplace-paravirt
Press Ctrl+X to Exit the editor and choose Yes to save. Then type the following commands:
chroot /target /bin/bash
update-grub
exit
And then return to the installation menu by typing “exit” again, the select “Finish the installation” and “Continue”. After the system reboots, you need to press Esc while the Grub menu is launching and select the generic boot option that we just edited.
(Many thanks to stuart @ amanzi for the last tricky part here which I've copied verbatim for the most part.)
Steps 2 and 3 - Configure Ubuntu for Drupal and Install Drupal
For now I'm just going to say follow the instructions here. They are excellent and I can't improve on them. Many thanks 2bits.com.
