Installation How To VistA/GT.M coLinux
Obsolete: Use Astronaut Installers instead.
deprecated, at least for now, in favor of QEMU
c.f. Using the VistA Appliance
Quickstart coLinux
- 1. The coLinux Wiki has adequate instructions. I will try to guide GT.M/VistA users to the most straight-forward route to a successful installation. There are many alternative Configurations possible, some more problematic than others.
- 2. CoLinux is delivered as a self-installing executable. We can either:
- a. Download coLinux-stable from sourceforge.
- (The current version as of this writing is 0.6.2-linux-2.6.10 found at: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=302431 )
- or: (better)
- b. Obtain a more recent snapshot of the current testing version from the coLinux wiki itself at http://www.colinux.org/snapshots/ I am working with the snapshot of version 0.6.3-pre13.
- Note: this gets us stable-coLinux-20050524.exe which produces a specially patched kernel-2.6.11.
- 3. The coLinux install can be anywhere on our XP machine. I have chosen to keep everything under C:\vfc\colinux . I will bold "C:\vfc\colinux" wherever a substitution should be made to use some other root directory.
- Run the colinux.exe to get this installation dialog:
- I suggest selecting all four of these components unless this is not a virgin install. This saves some manual labor and potential confusion.
- Everything goes into our chosen directory:
- The next decision point is whether to download a root filesystem image.
- I use the debian default:
1. The file Debian-3.0r2.ext3-mit-backports.1gb.bz2 needs to be expanded to its full size. I installed 7-Zip for that purpose. The expanded Debian-3.0r2.ext3-mit-backports.1gb occupies 1,048,576 KB. I moved the bz2 to my archive directory |
2. Next is a swap file. There are utilities for rolling our own detailed on the Wiki. Or just download one from: http://gniarf.nerim.net/colinux/swap/ . It will need to be expanded from its .bz2 to the correct size. |
3. Next, we must tweak our colinux Configuration file to match this installation. This ships as default.colinux.xml and needs to be edited, thus: |
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <colinux> <block_device index="0" path="\DosDevices\c:\vfc\coLinux\Debian-3.0r2.ext3-mit-backports.1gb" enabled="true" /> <block_device index="1" path="\DosDevices\c:\vfc\coLinux\swap_512Mb" enabled="true" /> <bootparams>root=/dev/cobd0</bootparams> <initrd path="initrd.gz" /> <image path="vmlinux" /> <memory size="64" /> <network index="0" type="tap" /> </colinux>
4.With this much done, we should be able to boot coLinux.
I start inside the Command Prompt because it helps with debugging. We go to our colinux directory:
C:\>cd c:\vfc\colinux
C:\vfc\colinux>colinux-daemon.exe –c default.colinux.xml
Hang on! Here comes debian!
a.Root’s password is “root” b.#df –h shows the partition /dev/codb0 is 14% used with 827Meg available. c.Debian linux is all there and running. d.#halt or #reboot exits the system.
5.Now we can make a colinux.default.bat file to boot the system. There is an option to use an nt console: Colinux-demon.exe –c default.colinux.xml –t nt
6.Networking: Now this is a whole special topic all its own. It is complex because the host XP operating system must own all the hardware devices. The hardware network interface is shared via a virtual connection from a phony NIC owned by coLinux. There are a couple of methods for accomplishing the link. In the end we should have a connection from within Linux that reaches the Internet via this virtual link.
Lots more to be added here :-)
With the network interface up and running we have much nicer interface using putty. And it works from anywhere on our LAN, of course.
--gra'pa Z 08:36, 26 Aug 2005 (CDT)