Oracle virtual machine

abdallah252

am using VB and its not easy

luisviveropena

Hi @abdallah252 , are you using VirtualBox, and you have issues with that? What issues do you have, and what guest are you running?

Regards,
Luis.

coop

From the title it sounds like you are running Oracle as your guest OS. We don't recommend that and in some LF courses we forbid it. While it is a close knock off of RHEL it has enough differences to be a pain and we do not test at all etc. It should work in lower level courses, but as I said we treat it as a fringe distribution and getting used to Oracle is only likely to mess you up on an exam.

heiko_s

I believe the OP refers to Oracle VirtualBox?

In many cases VB is as easy as it can get. But it also depends on what you are trying to do. And it depends on the hardware and OS (Windows, Linux ?).

I could probably guide you through using QEMU / kvm and libvirt / virt-manager, but that might be more challenging and requires the host OS to be Linux.

coop

VMPlayer is free of charge (on Linux and Windows) and is equivalent to Virtual Box. Please no holy wars on which is better. As heiko said, kvm is only on Linux and you can use Azure on Windows, but I have no experience with that. (on Macs, vmplayer is called Fusion and costs money but is not expensive. I don't know why it is not free as VBox is)

Alex_Cooper

The problem could be better defined, but it might be related to my experience yesterday. I ran into problems trying to follow the instructions in "Installation: What to Use for this Course" for the topic of "4.2 Installing a Hypervisor and a Virtual Machine". I tried both Oracle Virtual Box and VMware only to run into an error telling me that I was missing some kernel headers (which I had a heck of a time finding a good answer to on Google since almost every solution asked me to manually sign stuff new Linux user here). This forum post for OpenSuse directed me to the solution "With YaST I installed kernel-devel (YaST added kernel-default-devel and two more packages). After that the Player made some additions to the kernel and then it started.", https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/533159-VMware-Player-14-1-3-does-not-start-because-it-asks-for-a-kernel-update. However, a more generalized solution may be needed for the course instructions. Hope this helps, thanks.

coop

BTW, VMplayer is at version 15.5.6, so I hope you used this. Whether or not you use vmplayer or virtualbox, the system has to compile and load a few kernel modules or it cannot run. I've yet to see an real Red Hat based system (RHEL, Fedora, Centos) not have them installed by default as without them no third party drivers can be installed properly. If they are not installed, a simple yum install kernel-devel would do it. I've also never seen a Ubuntu or SUSE system that does not have the kernel-dev stuff installed for the same reason. Were you on OpenSUSE? I'm less used to running that OS as a host although I do it as a VM all the time, and we do compile kernel modules with it for kernel devel courses.

IF your host in any linux system you can run the ready-for.sh script at https://training.linuxfoundation.org/cm/prep with options such as

../ready-for.sh --install LFS201 LFD420
and I"m sure you will have all necessary packages installed, including kernel devel. (You should not need the LFD420 but it won't hurt.)

What exactly were you running as the host?

Alex_Cooper

I did a fresh install of openSuse Leap 15.1, same with VMware 15.5.6, on an old laptop (Toshiba Tecra i3 from years back) for this boot camp. Now the story of why I chose openSuse is a result of another week-long troubleshooting session I had. I was trying to use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS at first, but for some odd reason it was not allowing my Ethernet connection to work. Same with CentOS 8.2. However, openSuse worked just fine. That's why I liked the idea of using VMware to provide a virtual machine for Ubuntu and CentOS bypassing my Ethernet mystery. I figured I would go back to dealing with the problem once I had more knowledge under my belt; i.e. stopped making things worse. I could go through the installation options again to see what I probably selected if it will help others (I tried to choose a basic workstation setup from the options list - email, office suite, music player, etc... maybe I needed to pick something more developer friendly).

Anyways, it did not come with kernel-devel already installed according to YaST. I believe I did run the ready-for.sh script for the LFS201 class prior to installing kernel-devel. Sorry, too many re-installs has made my memory a bit blurry. I just ran the check and it shows I have everything ready for LFS201. I used Rufus 3.11 on my Windows machine to make the bootable USB drive. I think that about covers it. My initial Google searches into the problem took me into UEFI secure boot and mokutil which took me way off target. Still a good learning experience and what I've come to expect from my adventures in Linux

coop

It is possible OpenSUSE doesn't come with kernel-devel installed, although I would be surprised, but I don't recall having checked in recent memory. I construct VMs from scratch frequently for use in our courses and we always run them through ready-for.sh with much more than LFS201 on the list. I know we are talking about the host here, but within the VMs we do run kernel building and module/driver installation etc.) In general, we don't do a lot of testing on openSUSE because the number of students using it (to be honest) is vanishingly small. Once upon a time our certification exams were given on openSUSE as well as the other two platforms, be this was stopped as it was not worth the expense, which is quite high.

As far as having no Ethernet on an old system, I am not shocked. I have had the same experience with CentOS on a not very old quad system I have, and to defeat it I had to copy the driver over manually after the install. It's actually more complicated than that. It is really just the initial install kernel that is defective -- you can then build your own kernels and fix it, but some of the tools you need are not installed either. I'm expert enough to figure it out but it is not for the faint-hearted. I'm not surprised CentOS failed, but I would have expected Ubuntu desktop/workstation to work as it is a more user-friendly distribution and not explicitly only enterprise. Likewise Fedora I would expect to have worked better. RHEL keeps the number of things installed (and thus supported) much lower which I understand.

luisviveropena

Hi @Alex_Cooper , please keep in mind that you will need an Ubuntu or CentOS system anyway, for preparing for the exam. Perhaps you can try installing VMware or VirtualBox in a newer hardware.

Many regards,
Luis.

coop

I believe Alex i using suse as a host for vmware or vbox? then he can install anything he wants as a vm within it.

luisviveropena

Oh, in that case it's all right

Luis.