Today I’m going to put together a complete walk through for getting your very own iFolder server up and running on a virtual host on your Apple Mac. iFolder is notoriously difficult to install but thanks to Daniel Lench, there is now an excellent tutorial over on his blog.
I’m taking it a tiny step further by documenting the process with screengrabs and showing how you can do this with Oracle’s VirtualBox. We chose Virtualbox over VMWare because on the Apple Mac, VMWare Fusion is not free whereas Virtualbox is. The instructions for VMWare would be different, but the intent would be the same.
Click on New to create a new virtual system
Fire up virtualbox and click on the blue NEW icon to start the process of creating a new virtual system.
Click Continue
Give it a name and ensure you choose Linux / OpenSuse
The default RAM is tight, but OK for this demo. Increase it on a real deployment.
Click Continue
Now we will be asked about the virtual hard drive we will need.
Continue
Continue
Continue
Done
Now we are asked to confirm the virtual machine we are going to create.
Done
And we’re done … or rather we now have an empty virtual machine that we can install the base operating system onto and then begin setting up for iFolder.
And there it is ...
It’s important to note at this stage that we are yet to put an operating system onto our virtual machine, and before we do that, we need to have some installation disks available.
iFolder is currently not qualified for OpenSUSE 11.4, so we need to download an installer for OpenSUSE 11.3 which we can grab from software.opensuse.org/113/en it is a big download, so kick it off and make yourself a nice cup of tea!
Download the DVD and make some tea!
Once you have the ISO on your computer, we can fire up the virtual machine and install OpenSUSE onto it. So first of all START the virtual machine we have just built and we’ll get the first run wizard.
Continue
Click the folder icon so we can browse to our ISO
Navigate to where our newly downloaded ISO file is.
Navigate then click Open
Continue
Done
Our virtual machine will now launch, boot from the virtual install DVD and we can begin the installation proper.
Select Installation and off we go ...
Rather than duplicate the official guide on how to proceed from here, I’m going to hand you over to the experts at Novell who have already prepared a full walk through on the simple installation procedure. The complete OpenSUSE installation guide for 11.3 can be found here.
In the next part, I’ll show you how to install the pre-requisites that you are going to need in order to install iFolder.
