Installing Debian on Virtual PC 2007

The company I work for has defined Virtual PC as our corporate standard for virtualization. As a result, getting any distro on Linux to run is can be a huge pain. For my own reasons, I prefer using Linux for running MySQL, Apache, & PHP. I am very aware of the fact that I could do all of this on the Windows OS, but I still prefer to do it under Linux. So I wanted to install debian and I could not find anything online about doing so. This is the first time I ever worked with debian, so I had that additional challenge.

So I started out by finding this entry at `The Sean Blog` about running Ubuntu from Virtual PC 2007. Of course you can’t really follow the steps, as you won’t find most of these in the debian install. We will not go through every step of the install as most of it is just common sense as to what to select. For the most part I simply selected the defaults and continued on. It wasn’t until after the first boot proceeding the installation that I had to do anything.

Steps I Took

1. Launched one of my XP virtual PCs. I needed to find out what display drivers my VPC was using. I don’t know if this is standard on all VPC, but mine was S3 Trio 32/64.
2. Created a virtual drive for debian.
3. Started the VPC and clicked the CD option at the top of the display and captured the ISO image I had downloaded. I opted to use the minimal CD image rather than download the entire DVD image.
4. When the VPC first launches into the install for debian, you should get a screen similar to this…
   
5. I simply selected ENTER to begin the install.
6. If you installed from the minimal ISO image, you will need to select your source for installation. I prefer to use http, but you may select another source if you would prefer. The hardest part about this is selecting a source you can connect to. My first choice always seems to be unavailable.
7. When you get to the `Configuring xserver-xfree86` screen, you can try to find the driver that was used in the XP image we looked at in step 1. There is not one with the specific name that I had, so I selected the `S3` driver. The first time I did the install, I used the default option that was selected, which was `vesa`. And I must admit that it seemed to function just fine. I didn’t like the fact that I could only select a 800×600 or 640×480 resolution. So I wanted to see what would happen if I selected another driver.
8. If your splash screen is unrecognizable, you can hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to out of the splash screen and into the terminal window.
9. Login as root and using your favorite editor open /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and find the section that looks similar to…

   Section "Screen"
    Identifier	"Default Screen"
    Device		"Generic Video Card"
    Monitor	"Generic Monitor"
    DefaultDepth	24

10. Change the DefaultDepth to 16. This is because Virtual PC appears to not support the 24 depth.
11. At this point you can restart your virtual PC. Then you should get a nice clean splash screen. If you don’t want to restart, try Ctrl+Alt+F7. This will bring you back to the splash screen. It will still look bad. Then you can try Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, this will restart X and then you should have a clean crisp login splash screen.

If someone has found a better way to achieve installing Debian on MS Virtual PC 2007, please share your experiences.