NTNU Cell Seminar Installation Guide

This page describes how to install a Fedora Core Linux image for VMware that will be used in the NTNU Cell Seminar. Please note that the unpacked files will use 6.7 GB of disk space (9.3 GB including the downloaded zip-file). Both downloading the Fedora image and unzipping it can take considerable time.

1. Download and install the VMware player

Windows Users

Download the VMware player:VMware player for Windows

Open this file and install the VMware player on your computer. You might not want to install the Google Searchbar. In this case, you must uncheck this option.

Ubuntu Linux Users

Install the vmware player by running the following command:

sudo aptitude install vmware-player

If aptitude asks if you want to overwrite existing files, answer yes.

There are some problems with the VMware install scripts at this time. Therefore, the previous command might not complete successfully. In this case, run the following command:

uname -a

This will print out your kernel version number and some other data. Then, you need to manually install the kernel modules corresponding to your kernel version. For instance, if you have the 2.6.20.16 kernel you need to execute the following command:

sudo aptitude install vmware-player-kernel-modules-2.6.20-16

With this module installed, the vmware-player package should install successfully.

2. Download the Fedora Image

Windows Users

To download the cell image, two programs are needed. Firstly, we need a bittorrent client. A good bittorrent client is uTorrent. Download and install this program.

In addition, we need a torrentfile. This file is available here. Save this file on your computer.

We are now ready to start the download of the Fedora image. When you start uTorrent, the following page is displayed:



Choose a connection type that corresponds to your internet connection. It is helpful to press the "Test if port is forwarded properly" button. If the port is not forwarded properly, you will experience problems when you start the download. These problems are most often due to problems with firewalls. Press "Use selected settings" to close the dialog box.



The next step is to add the torrent. Press File -> Add Torrent and the above screen is shown. Choose the torrentfile you downloaded earlier and press Open.



There is no need to change anything in this screen.



Wait patiently while the file is downloaded as it will take some time. If you download from inside NTNU, you can get a very fast download rate. This might create problems for the other applications. You can limit the maximum download rate in uTorrent by choosing Options -> Preferences and the Connection tab.

Ubuntu Linux Users

Again, a bittorrent client and the bittorrent file is needed. Ktorrent is an easy-to-use bittorrent client and it can be installed by using the following commandline:

sudo aptitude install ktorrent

In addition, you need to download the torrent file and open this in ktorrent. Read the instructions for Windows users if you run into problems. This might help as ktorrent and uTorrent have very similar user interfaces.

3. Start the Fedora Image in VMware

This step is the same for both Windows and Linux users.

The first task is to unzip the downloaded zip file (Cell-VMware-FC6-SDK21-IDE-02May07.zip) into a folder, for instance C:\cell. If you used the uTorrent client, the file can be found under My Documents -> Downloads. Please note that the unzipping will take time. Furthermore, some of the files are very large so it might seem like the unzip program does not make progress.

Then, open the C:\cell\fedora-fc6-i386.vmx file in a text editor. Make sure that the memsize parameter is set to half of the available physical memory on your machine. This value is measured in megabytes.



The above image shows a configuration file where the memsize parameter is set to 512 MB.

The next step is to start the VMware player. Note that the name of the application is vmplayer on linux. It will ask for the path to the vmx configuration file we just edited. When this file is provided, the image is booted.

Use the following credentials to log on:
Username: root
Password: inn0vate

When you have logged on, you have installed all the needed components for the Cell Seminar at NTNU and the following screen is shown:



Do not install the security updates offered when you run VMware as these can make it impossible to boot the Fedora image.

Do not upgrade to VMware version 2.x as this can cause problems.

If you want to use a Norwegian keyboard layout in a shell, you can issue the command:

setxkbmap no

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