For some odd reason, the guys over at Skype is refusing to release a pure 64-bit version of Skype for Fedora. Instead they ship an i586 version, without any dependencies defined for the 32-bit libraries is require. Here is what you need to install to make it work:
1 | yum install -y libXv.i686 libXScrnSaver.i686 qt.i686 qt-x11.i686 |
Fedora releases are sometimes a bit flaky, and Fedora 13 isn’t an exception – at least not when I was trying to install it on my MacBook Pro 5,5. It simply froze while booting the installation operating system – last display error was “Waiting for hardware to initialize”. Hours later, it turns out the magic trick is to add the nomodeset kernel option when booting the installation.
I’ve been playing around with Sun VirtualBox. Installation of both Windows XP and CentOS 5 went smooth, but installing the guest OS tweaks – in the VirtualBox world referred to as Additions – gave me a little trouble on CentOS. It’s done the same way as on VMWare, by mounting an ISO with the scripts and drivers required. It’s not as painless as on VMWare though.
For starters, you have to find the ISO yourself – but I’ll give you a hint: look in /usr/share/virtualbox/ 
After mounting the ISO image, a directory popped up. I tried double clicking on autorun.sh but nothing ever comes easy, does it? I tried running it in the terminal, and was somewhat enlightened as I realized it was looking in vain for gksu – probably a Gnome frontend for su. Luckily there seemed to be another script I could run – VBoxLinuxAdditions-amd64.run – but it whined about OpenGL direct rendering:
Before I ran the script, I made sure the newly installed CentOS was crispy by running yum upgrade. I also had a sneaking suspicion that a C compiler was required, so I made sure the system also sported gcc. The only thing I personally noticed by reading the message above, was that some missing OpenGL crap prevented the additions to be installed. As I was typing the message in this blog, I also noticed something about kernel headers. Rather embarrassing, but I really didn’t see it until now. Anyway, obviously the thing needed was kernel goodness, so I ran yum install kernel-devel. That seemed to make the VirtualBox additions script more happy and now it seems to be running flawlessly.
So, to summarize – what to do to make the damned thing work:
I rebooted as I was told to, but mouse integration didn’t seem to work. Probably due to the kernel being upgraded without rebooting and actually utilizing it. So, I ran the additions script again, rebooted again and woo – mouse integration seems to work. The clipboard doesn’t though, and the maching is still creating some really nasty spikes on my CPU graph every three seconds or so:
It’s worth mentioning that when I’m running my Windows XP guest in VirtualBox, the CPU graphs on the host system are nice and flat.
I’m not entirely pleased, but I think VirtualBox will eventually win me over from VMWare.
