I had to make a few tweaks to get it working, so I figured I'd share them to save some trial and error to anyone wanting to do the same:
- create a new virtual machine with a 3G virtual HD, which should be plenty for VL5, an entire 1G partition for puppy play, and 512M of swap.
- first off the VL5STD install script didn't like seeing an unformatted and unpartionned HD (invalid ID 0x00000 or something like that). I couldn't figure out how to solve it in VL so I mounted the puppy image, booted into puppy and ran fdisk there to create my partitions
- then I attached the VL5STD CD, booted from it and the install ran fine (but keep reading)
- VirtualPC emulates sb16 sound, it's not autodetected so you need to probe for it (ignore the warning about it being unsafe)
- after my first try at installing, the system would hang at the "starting hotplug" stage of the boot, so I disabled hotplug (didn't install the package, and passed nohotplug as one of the optional LILO arguments)
- DO NOT set up X during the original install, it just caused the install to hang. Instead skip over it and setup to boot in the text interface (we'll fix that below)
- after you have finished the install, run "vasm", the Vector Linux configuration utility. Choose advanced vasm (enter root password) and set up X. During the X setup the virtual PC screen turned a greenish color making it hard to read, but still allowed me to finish the install.
- while in vasm you might as well choose your windows manager
- exit vasm and do not start X yet, it gave me a garbage looking screen at that point. To fix it edit /etc/X11/xorg.cong and replace the line that says:
Driver "s3"
with
Driver "vesa"
- now you should be able to type "startx" and be in business
I wasn't familiar with Vector Linux, but it's a nice clean simple distribution. Too bad in doesn't come on a liveCD
