Enjoy Linux under Vmware

VMWARE
Vmware is commercial product and you have to pay to use it. But VMWare Player – the application which allows to run new or pre-release software contained in virtual machines, is completely free! Also, there are available a collection of pre-built virtual appliances for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell Linux Desktop, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, rPath and Ubuntu Linux. So, you have absolutely legal way to run Linux under Windows. Thanks to VMware Team for excellent product and this possibility 🙂

Fedora based one CD distributions

Recently I’ve decided try to use Linux under Windows. I got and installed vmware. I work under Fedora Core 4 at work and I have second operation system on my home PC also Fedora. I know it and I’d like to install on vmware Fedora but this distribution contains 4 CDs. it’s too big for this task. I made a search and found several one CD disrtibutions based on Fedora Core:

  1. FoXLinux
  2. Cobind Desktop
  3. G-ZyX
  4. KRUD Linux and KRUDserver Linux

KRUDserver distribution seems good for me but it is not free. G-ZyX has very scant information. Cobind Desktop is based on GNOME. I don’t like GNOM at all. So, my choice is FoXLinux (it uses KDE :)). Today I’m going to download it and install.

Grub is really cool!

AS I already wrote I made a small upgrade of my home PC: I boutgh LCD display and new hard drive. I installed the hard drive as a master and an old one as slave. The problem was I had two OS on the old disk – Linux and Windows and used GRUB as boot loader. After adding new hard disk and installing Windows there I couldn’t boot Linux anymore. I had to change boot options in BIOS to boot from slave disk and use Linux. It was terrible! Thanks to Yoshinori K. Okuji for excellent tool GRUB. I just loaded GRUB shell:
[root@maverik ~]$ grub
chose root (hd0 – master, hd1 – slave, but because I booted from slave it’s hd0 and master – hd1):

grub> root (hd0,5)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

and copied GRUB files to the master hard drive:

grub> setup (hd1,5)

As result I can boot new or previous version of Windows and Linux! Thanks to GRUB and Linux 🙂

Run kppp without root password

Once I already faced with problem to run kppp without root password. It’s so annoying! After upgrade to Fedora 4 I forgot to make needed changes. And as result now I have to type root password again.
I found my old post about this problem but this approach was not working! So, I found new one.
To avoid typing root password when kppp is running only one thing should be done – in the file /etc/pam.d/kppp change line
auth sufficient pam_rootok.so
on
auth sufficient pam_permit.so
Bingo! Now kppp can start without root password!