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!

Installing Java 6 JDK on Ubuntu

None of the posts I found on this worked quite right, so I’m writing up what I did here for future reference.


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-cache search java6


When I did this, the results I got included:


default-jdk
default-jre
default-jre-headless
openjdk-6-jdk
openjdk-6-jre
openjdk-6-jre-headless


If I’m interpreting it right, that means the Sun JDK is not available for installation via apt-get, at least the way I have it configured. But people said that the OpenJDK works fine too. So I decided to install it. It seems that specifying “default-jdk” just installs “openjdk-6-jdk” anyway:


sudo apt-get install default-jdk


When this completed, /usr/bin/java was set up for me. But I did have to add a JAVA_HOME environment variable to my .bashrc file:


export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre"


After that, I was set to go.