Installing Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy” Tribe 2 in QEMU : bug fix

Recently I started playing with virtualization on my new machine, mainly so that I could do more testing for Ubuntu. With the release of Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy” Tribe 1 (first alpha release) I was excited to get going and get testing. Well, unfortunately I was quickly disappointed in that a bug in the 7.10 series causes it to be non-installable in a QEMU virtualization system. I reported the bug (#120316) and a few of us have been doing further testing since.

I had hoped that the release of Tribe 2 (second alpha release) would solve the issue. Unfortunately the bug remained. Here went the second alpha release of the soon to be most improved release yet and I was still unable to do any testing… until today.

I came home this morning after watching Transformers (very cool, by the way!) and found an email bug fix. My hat goes off to Henrik Riomar who pointed out a fix on launchpad that now allows gutsy to be installed in QEMU. Thank you for helping find a solution and thank you even more for sharing the fix. Isn’t this what makes open source and free software so amazing? Small people working around the world come up with big solutions and improve existing software.

The quick fix, in case you’re wondering, is outlined below:

For gutsy-alternate-i386.iso (Tribe2)

In the boot menu
1. Push F6 ( Other Options)
2. remove: "quiet --"
3. add: "ata_piix.blacklist=yes"
4. Push Enter

The installer will now work fine in QEMU.

I will sit down in a few more minutes and write up a tutorial on how to setup QEMU for virtualization, optionally using KVM modified QEMU for improved performance.. and lastly how to install Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy” Tribe 2 on your virtual machine for testing and improvement of the greatest distro of all time.

Happy 4th of July everyone.