Getting Fedora 18 set up on VirtualBox: Round 2

Wow, sure has been a while since I've set up a new Linux machine. I am missing all my aliases and keyboard shortcuts!! Ahh!!

Learned a few more things tonight. Apparently the default user you make in Fedora 18 does not have Administrator access, so that's why I was having problems doing anything outside of root. I just learned the difference between "su" and "su -" as well. You can put a user into a group called "wheel" that gives sudo access which is fancy. I guess I haven't set up a machine in quite a while, and I am used to having these things all work a certain way from the get-go. Crazy times. Anyhoo fiddled with this for a while and got it to work.

For some reason you can't right click on the background to get a terminal?!?!? That's NOT default Linux behaviour, which was really surprising. For that I needed ot install "nautilus-open-terminal". Who would have thought? (*Note, turns out this is just cause I am new to Gnome 3, and these are all Gnome 2 features I am used to, so you can install something called gnome-tweak-tool that allows you to do stuff you'd expect to be able to do on Linux, like right click the background and get a terminal window.) :)

Ok this is pretty sweeeet. The website http://extensions.gnome.org has a bunch of add-ons you can load just from a web browser, and they will install on your local machine. Pretty sweet. That allowed me to get a nice quick launch sidebar and some other useful stuff.

Alright back to work trying to get my build of the Sugar OS running!

Almost there...

As it turns out my problems last night were related to software group permissions (ain't that always the thing, eh!) After I got some great advice from one of the friendly folks at Sugar Labs who said it looked like an "Authentication Problem", I realized I was trying to run the code as "mjutan", but I had sync'd and built as "root" (since mjutan was not a sudoer when I tried to do this yesterday). All of this led to my build not launching.

After all is said and done... I've got Sugar running from source code I built!!!! Hooray! This is great news. I'll need to install some other activities but then it ought to be pretty straightforward from this point to iterate on the work and see the results back in Sugar. Very nice.

Sugar OS, running from built source code on Fedora 18, which is emulated on my Windows 7 machine through VirtualBox

Hooraaaay!!!!!!! Awesome to get this going. Next step will be to read through the "Make your own sugar activities" manual in full (or as much as I need to) and then start planning the changes I am going to make to the existing Recording app, or alternatively plan out my own app in more detail. I gotta see if I can playback movie files through this VirtualBox thing, hopefully my video card doesn't freak out.

More details as I figure 'em out :) Till next time... Mike :)

PS More good news. Audio and Video playback both work in the VirtualBox instance. I tested running a .ogg file with audio and video and it looks good. So that means I'll be able to test playback with pre-recorded ogg files from my XO laptop. Sweet.