Monday, July 7, 2008

mouse keys in virtual pc 2007 and ubuntu hardy heron 8.04

a few notes about getting ubuntu hardy heron 8.04 running under Virtual PC 2007 and using it via a remote desktop connection to the virtual pc host computer (or at least to get the installation done successfully with custom partitioning).

to boot up the hardy heron 8.04 (kubuntu-desktop in my case) live CD successfully without virtual pc complaining about a processor error and promptly crashing the virtual instance, you need to follow these steps:

1. choose your language upon first boot of the live CD inside the virtual pc instance (english in my case)
2. press F4 and choose the Safe Graphics mode option (down arrow to it, then enter)
3. press F6 and add: "noreplace-paravirt" to the command line that shows on the screen (without the quotes)
4. press Enter to continue the process

The live cd should boot to a linux desktop (KDE or Gnome or ... depending on which live CD you are using)

to continue the installation, choose the install icon on the desktop, at this point, you may find it hard to use the mouse (via remote desktop connection to the windows host machine), so I suggest turning on mouse keys to use the number pad as a mouse instead, following these steps:

press the left-alt + left-shift + num-lock buttons together, at first, your windows host machine will ask about turning on mouse keys, I chose to disable the mouse key shortcut (in the windows host machine that I was RDP'd into), and closed out the mouse keys configuration menus, and then repeated the process of pressing left-alt + left-shit + num-lock again, and this time, the linux session recognized it (KDE in my case) and brought up a configuration window for it, I used the keyboard and pressed tab to change focus to "continue", and then spacebar for choosing continue. Now if num-lock is turned on, i can use the number pad to move my mouse around (5 is left click btw).