I discovered frustration today while trying to install Kubuntu 9.10 on a virtual machine for use while testing web applications. The installation would begin, the screen would flash the message "Initializing key maps...", a flash of green garbage would appear on the screen, and then the virtual would disappear. Wow. I tried all of the multiple settings on the installation options menu to no avail. I finally gave up and was searching for a smaller, minimal Linux distro to download and came across my browser tab with my search for "kubuntu won't install virtual pc," I decided to give it one more shot, reworded the search to "kubuntu won't install on windows 7 64-bit virtual pc." The 8th result caught my eye: "NemesisV: Installing Ubuntu 9.04 on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1." It worked! The blog entry is worth checking out, in short, remove "quiet splash --" from install options and replace it with "vga=791 noreplace-paravirt" - Mission accomplished.
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The article:
Installing Ubuntu 9.04 on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1 - NemesisV - http://nemesisv.blogspot.com/2009/04/installing-ubuntu-904-on-microsoft.html
***UPDATE - 4/26/2010***
I was never actually able to bring the system up. It installed just fine but when I rebooted the virtual to bring up the installed system, all I got was a blank screen (regular mode) or a bunch of segmentation faults (recovery mode). I'm assuming I was getting the segmentation faults in regular mode, I just couldn't see them.
I finally gave up on Kubuntu & downloaded and installed Ubuntu 9.10. It installed (using the advice above), rebooted, and is currently running with no issues . . . I guess KDE just is ready the virtual spotlight . . .
***UPDATE - 4/26/2010 (Yes, again)***
Ran into the same problem later today with the Ubuntu install, after a third reboot I started getting segmentation faults again. WTH? I was really annoyed so I did even more research the final conclusion was insane: I had allocated 512MB of RAM to the VM; once I upped that to 1GB (1024MB) it started working. The only thing I had changed between the time in which it was working and when it stopped working was a reboot (of the host system). I had disabled hardware virtualization acceleration earlier in the day but that did work so I had re-en
abled it and rebooted it when it was working. I rebooted later in the day and the virtual stopped working after that; the only conclusion I can draw is that the virtualization acceleration hadn't actually restarted and restarted after the (2nd) reboot.
So my current theory is that Ubuntu will run on Windows 7 64-bit Virtual PC with less than 1GB of RAM when hardware virtualization acceleration is disabled. When hardware acceleration is enabled, 1GB+ is required. I haven't tried this with the Kubuntu distro yet, but I'm pretty certain that the results will be similar. Thoughts and comments are welcome!