Setting Up a CentOS VM in VirtualBox

I’ve been trying to set up a CentOS VM in VirtualBox, and had a lot more trouble than I’ve had with other Linux distros. The prebuilt image I tried from virtualboxes.org had issues with the networking adapter and keyboard layout. Trying the minimal or network installer had the same problems.

I was eventually able to solve it by installing from the Live CD disk image.

Set Up a Subversion Server For Free in Zero Steps

Want a Subversion server? Your options usually boil down to:

1. Pay for an expensive hosted solution.
2. Use an unreliable or crippled free hosted solution.
3. Wait for your IT department to set one up for you.
4. Slog through setting one up yourself.

Maybe setting up a Subversion server is easy if you’re a Linux expert, but, if you’re anything like me, there are a million things that can go wrong in the configs, and no online guide gets all the instructions right.

Well, as of now there’s a better solution. I’m posting a virtual machine image that has a working Subversion installation, tied to Apache. Download it, start it, and you’ve got a Subversion server!

It’s a VirtualBox image running Fedora 14. It includes a README file with instructions on how to start and access svn, and add new users. Download it here:

SubversionVM.zip

Unfortunately, I can’t provide any support for this image (I just cobbled it together myself). But I hope it’s helpful!

Duplicating a VirtualBox Hard Disk on Mac Host

I’m running VirtualBox on a Mac OS X host, and I had one .VDI hard disk file that I needed to duplicate into three and use them all at the same time. When I tried to load them all into different VMs inside VirtualBox, I got an error that a hard disk with that UUID was already in use.

Turns out that you can’t just duplicate the hard disk file–you need to use a command called VBoxManage to do it. But it took me a while to find out how to run that command on a Mac.

Here’s what you need to do in a console window:


/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxManage clonevdi path/to/yourold.vdi path/to/vditocreate.vdi


It will probably take a while, and it will only update the progress indicator every 10% or so, so have some patience and you should be set. Once the duplicate is made, just create a new VM in VirtualBox, and choose your new .VDI file.