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Virtual Box, Linux Mint, Drupal and civiCASE — Part 1

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JohnS

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The following are notes related to running Linux Mint 16 Xfce inside Oracle’s VirtualBox and installing Drupal so I can use civiCRM to run civiCase. Whew!

In Summary:

  1. Setup VirtualBox and Linux Mint 16 xfce
    1. Download VirtualBox
    2. Download and install a VirtualBox image of Linux Mint 16 xfce
    3. Setup the Mint virtual machine
  2. Setup the web server and helpers
    1. Install Apache2 web server
    2. Install MySQL
    3. Install PHPmyadmin
    4. Install PHP5
  3. Setup Drupal Content Management System
    1. Install Drupal
    2. Create a Drupal site
    3. Install the Drupal module civiCRM
  4. Setup civiCase

Setting up the basics

VirtualBox and Linux Mint 16

I tried installing Mint 16 xfce on my older dual core machine but it didn’t like my graphics card (it worked, but I couldn’t get my full monitor’s resolution) and it didn’t like my wireless pci card (it found it and found wireless routers, but it wouldn’t allow the password to get through). In frustration, I tried loading Mint 16 in a VirtualBox but that didn’t work for me either (something not quite setup right, my lack of understanidng I’m sure). Then I got the bright idea to look for a pre-built virtual machine of Mint 16 xfce and sure enough it was out there. All I had to do was download it, unzip it, and import it into my VirtualBox program.

Setting up the Mint virtual machine

Install VirtualBox

Download VirtualBox from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. Install and run.

Download and import the virtual machine “appliance”

Download the Linux Mint 16 xfce virtual image from

http://virtualboximages.com/LinuxMint+16+XFCE+32+Bit+VirtualBox+VDI+Virtual+Computer.

Extract the virtual image folder from the downloaded rar file. If you have trouble extracting a rar file try 7zip at

http://www.7-zip.org/download.html.

Open the extracted folder and you can actually just double-click the vbox file to run it, but it’s better to actually import into the VirtualBox Manager.

Import the virtual machine

  1. Open the Oracle VM VirtualBox (actual program name)
  2. Click on “new”
  3. Give a descriptive name, select Linux as type, and Ubuntu as version (Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu). We downloaded a 32bit system, but if you downloaded and want to use the 64bit version be sure to select that.
  4. Click next and accept the defaults, click next again.
  5. In the window that comes up, “Create a virtual hard drive now” is automatically selected. We don’t want that. Select “Use an existing virtual hard drive file” and navigate to the folder where you extracted the “appliance”. You can then select the file that is shown.
  6. Click “Create” and away it goes.
  7. The new virtual machine shows up in your Manager window. The following isn’t exactly what you’ll see because I already have a bunch of clones, but you get the idea.

Clone the imported virtual machine

The very first step is to make a clone of the virtual machine. This is done because mistakes get made and importing the image is a drag.

  1. Right click on the virtual machine and select <clone>
  2. Give the new machine a name, perhaps one that indicates your intent (I used Drupal-linuxmint-16-xfce-dvd-32bit).

    ** If in the future you want to run several of these clones at the same time you’ll have to check the box “Reinitialize theMAD address” but for now leaving it blank is just fine.

  3. Click Next and make sure “Full Clone” is selected, then click “Clone”

Next Step — Apply some settings to the virtual machine

Now right click on the clone, select <Settings> and apply some settings.

  1. Because we used a pre-built virtual machine a lot of settings were already provided.
  2. We want to select the Advanced tab and select Bidirectional on the Shared Clipboard option. This will help later if we need to transfer information from our base machine into the VM (virtual machine). Leave the other settings as they are for now.
  3. Now select the Network option, make sure Enable Network Adapter is selected, and choose <Bridged Adapter> in the drop down list for “Attached to:”. This will allow you to access other machines (including your host) from the virtual machine.
  4. That should do it for Settings on the cloned VM (virtual machine).

Start the VM

To start the vm you can double-click the one you want, right click the cloned VM or, once you highlight the VM you want to use, click the Start button

Summary

If all has gone well, you will see a window open up and Linux Mint 16 xfce will boot up. A browser window will open to show a variety of web sites. If the sites don’t show, well then trouble shooting is in order. I might reply to a comment, but no guarantees. The VirtualBox and Mint communities will help … do some searching. Now we are ready to install Drupal, which necessitates several other programs to be installed first.

We’ll cover that in the next post Part 2

 Click for Part 2