My notes, things I have learned, and documentation I have created.

To get Tversity to install/run on a Vista Ultimate installation that is joined to a domain, I had to disable “User Access Control.” I did it via the msconfig utility executed from a “Command Prompt.” Go to Tools/Disable UAC.

Note: If Vista is not joined to a domain, you can disable “User Access Control” via Control Panel/User Accounts/User Accounts.” From there, you can click “Turn User Account control on or off.”

You have to reboot after changing the setting.

Add the following to the .vmx configuration file for the guest.

bios.forceSetupOnce = “TRUE”

From a command prompt:
nslookup
set q=srv
_ldap._tcp.dc._msdcs.Active_Directory_domain_name

I used this method in a very simple configuration. I had one Windows 2003 server/forest/domain controller with a few XP/Vista clients.

From the Windows 2003 Domain Controller:

Bring up “Active Directory Domains and Trusts”, from Administrative Tools.
Right mouse click on the domain name (usually a “.local” name), and click on “Raise Domain Functional Level”.
Change the level “Windows 2003”. Note: This is not reversible and you are warned in the application as well.
Next, right mouse click on “Active Directory Domains and Trusts,” and click on “Raise Forest Functional Level.”
Change the forest level to “Windows 2003” as well. Note: This is also not reversible.
Next, copy the source/adprep directory off the “Windows 2008 Server” CD to a your Windows 2003 domain controller.
From the copied adprep directory, execute adprep /forestprep.
Then, execute adprep /domainprep.

At this point, you can run dcpromo from your Windows 2008 server. However, you need to make sure you have the “Active Directory Domain Services.” role installed.

I have run a DNS issue, and have not been able to get dcpromo to complete. Will update when I get it to work.

Boot from the installation source CD/image.

Enter the Recovery Console by pressing R when prompted.

Enter the number for the appropriate installation.

Enter “bootcfg /list” to list the current configuration.

Enter “boot /rebuild” to rebuild configuration.

At “Enter Load Identifier”, enter the name of the installation (i.e. “Windows XP”.

If prompted for “OS Load Options”, enter “/fastdetect”.

Enter “EXIT” to reboot

I used this method on CentOS5 and used the rpmforge repository to install mencoder (yum install mencoder).

mencoder -forceidx -ovc copy -oac copy -o combinedfilename.avi firstfilename.avi secondfilename.avi

Download poweriso from http://poweriso.com/download.htm. If you are using linux, the download is a tarball. I extracted the one and only file from the tarball (poweriso).

Sample commands:

List contents:
poweriso list /path-to-daa-file /

List contents recursively:
poweriso list /path-to-daa-file / -r

Extract:
poweriso extract /path-to-daa-file / -od /path-to-destination-directory

Convert:
poweriso convert /path-to-daa-file -o /path-to-destination-iso-file -ot iso

If you get the following kind of error when using a problem that has some perl module dependencies, you can get the following type of error if you are missing one of the dependencies.

“Can’t locate XX/YYYYYY/ZZZZ.pm in @INC …”

Use the following to determine the package that contains the module:

yum whatprovides ‘perl(XX::YYYYYY::ZZZZ)’

It should work in newer Fedora/CentOS/Redhat releases.

Download and install the Xcode Tools from the Apple Developer Connection website (http://connect.apple.com).

This controller is found in some older Dell servers.

Install Fedora 10.
Boot of the first install CD in rescue mode and chroot /mnt/sysimage.
cd /boot
mv initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img.orig
mkinitrd –with=scsi_wait_scan initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img
exit
exit # to reboot
This worked fine for me on a Dell1600 with Perc controller. In troubleshooting this, I found some posts saying that the module is call scsi_wait-scan. This is incorrect. Scsi_wait_scan worked fine for me.