Installing VirtualBox on Ubuntu was just a wee bit easier than on Fedora. In Ubuntu you had two options: There was the VirtualBox OSE edition in the Ubuntu repo’s, or you could add the official Sun VirtualBox repo to your apt sources.list file and install the non-OSE from there.

In Fedora, things are a little bit differently, so perhaps this will help you out.

First, prepare your Fedora system.

There are a few packages you should install FIRST before installing VirtualBox - to take care of these, open a console.

Get root privilages in the Terminal with:

su

Now, enter the following command to install the necessary packages:

yum install make automake autoconf gcc kernel-devel dkms

While all of these packages are critical for building the required Kernel module, I want to specifically mention DKMS. What DKMS will do is automatically rebuild the VirtualBox kernel modules for you any time your kernel is updated keeping you from having to do this manually.

Now, head over to VirtualBox’s Download site and grab the installer for Fedora 9 (yes, it will work fine on Fedora 10 - although they should have a F10 file up soon). Grab the file appropriate for your architecture (32-bit vs. 64-bit).

Once that is downloaded open up a root terminal in the directory where you downloaded this file and use the following command to install:

yum --nogpgcheck localinstall Installer_Filename.rpm

After the file is installed your Kernel module should automatically be built for you, and should stay up to date using DKMS as new Kernel versions get installed.

Finally, your user should be added to the vboxusers user group so again, at a root prompt, enter the following command:

usermod -G vboxusers -a username

If you still have SELinux enabled, you will also want to fix the SELinux permissions. This will take care of that:

chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox.so

Now - you should be all set! Happy Virtualizing!

I’ll provide some instructions but they are incredibly minimal (just to get the Radeon 7500 driver installed which most Thinkpad T40s have) as much of the hardware is recognised when Windows 7 installs.

I can’t really lament much on the installation as nothing went wrong and it all went as you could expect. After plugging in my LAN cable, Windows 7 appeared to download some updates and drivers as it then installed the Intel 2100B wireless card’s drivers. So now it’s all up and running.

Thankfully I can report that the taskbar whilst it does in some ways resemble the OS X in working (e.g. pinning non running applications and shortcuts together) you can configure it to use small icons as Windows does at the moment in Vista and earlier, and to display a text label by the icon too, like all other release versions of Windows – see the screenshot on the left for the full idea. When the taskbar becomes full, like windows are grouped together and hovering or clicking on the grouped taskbar icon allows you to switch to which window you want much as you do in XP or Vista at the moment.

Hallelujah!

The real benefit is you can move the order of the windows around in the taskbar so if you have a workflow say three Firefox windows, one which might be your CMS editor window, the second your preview window and the third your upload to the main web webserver window, you can keep these in a left to right order for a clean workflow. Unfortunately in Vista, XP and earlier, the order of your window tabs can’t be moved around.

I also really like the large show desktop bar on the right of the taskbar, it’s much easier to swipe down to it, click and show the desktop than move to a small QuickLaunch ‘Show Desktop’ icon.

So far my impressions are very favourable! Stay tuned for much more in depth discussion.