Installing Fedora in Virtual Box
This is the first of a series of posts about installing Fedora Linux.
Fedora is the free version of Red Hat Linux. It also serves as a testing ground and communication pipeline to the larger Linux community for Red Hat. The Fedora project was formally separated from Red Hat under the name “Fedora Core” (now simply “Fedora”) in 2003, but the Red Hat company sponsors and benefits from the Fedora project.
Fedora is free and open source. Red Hat is open source, but not free.
Red Hat has a large presence in the enterprise market; the current commercial release is called RHEL (for Red Hat Enterprise Linux) v. 6. The current release of Fedora is v. 14. Note that the version numbers for RHEL are not coordinated with the version numbers for Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core/Fedora.
When you pay for RHEL, you pay for support. It’s a business model that has served Red Hat well.
Redhat is one of the oldest Linux distributions. I remember back in the 90s buying a book on something computer-related; a Red Hat Linux v. 4.x CD was included with it, but we only had one family computer at the time and I didn’t have the nerve to risk blowing up our one and only home computer. That CD is long gone.
But I’ve remained curious. In the past, I’ve run CentOS, which is considered a free and open source equivalent to RHEL. Thanks to Virtual Box, I’m now familiarizing myself with Fedora.
First, I created a Virtual Box virtual machine, accepting the settings suggested by Virtual Box for the disk and memory size. This pictures shows the settings.
Most of the screen shots that will appear in later posts are from Fedora 13; I have since updated to Fedora 14. The installation procedure was identical.
Next: Booting the CD and Preparing the Installation.