Installing pclinuxos-kde-2012.08.iso in VirtualBox 4.2.4

[kjpetrie]

It depends how much he wants to do with his pclos VM before he wishes to replace XP. You can get away without a swap partition but if you run out of RAM (and a VM has less RAM than a real machine) the machine will crash. I think it's safer to have swap. The machine will freeze while swapping, and VMs being slower will freeze for longer, but it won't crash.

As for letting the installer take the whole drive, doesn't that separate /home onto a different partition, thus limiting flexibility on a small virtual drive?

Besides, it's good to think about these things at the testing stage as it provides a better understanding for the real thing later on.

[vieuxrichard]

Well third time lucky. I removed the "saved" one and started afresh. This time all went well. I got to the Draklive -Install and this time one Install screen & 2 options;
Use free space (default)
Custom disk partitioning

So I chose the default, which then showed "computing total size". After which both sda1 & sda6 were formatted. No need to choose swap, /, home (thank the Lord).
Then "Installing PCLInuxOS to your Computer" appeared (the process used between 30-60% CPU usage)

Finally some options appeared as in; Bootloader
GRUB with graphical men (default)
GRUB with text menu
LILO    with text menu

So I chose the default - et voilà.

Only question - how do I logout?

[sling-shot]

You are still in the Live evironment.
Use the PC Menu button on the lower left hand corner of the screen inside VirtualBox window.

You should shutdown now. Then go to VirtualBox main window, select Settings for this virtual machine and remove the .iso image. Keep the virtual hard disk as it is. Then restart the machine.

[vieuxrichard]

Thank you sling-shot. I did as you suggested & restarted PCLOS. I went through time zone question then had to input Name, userID & password.
The system then appeared with a new screen with my name, my User ID, root and a space for the password, which it does not seem to accept - neither does it accept root.
What to do now?

[sling-shot]

The screen you are seeing is the login window.

You remember that you had created an account and given a password earlier, right?

Now the "root" is the 'super user' in Linux. He can do anything with the computer, no questions asked. But this also means that sometimes he may do something silly and destroy this installation itself.

Hence you generally should not use root for your day to day computing.

Instead, click on the other username you have and once it is highlighted, click inside the password box and type the password corresponding to the username. (you have assigned this earlier when you were asked to create it in the installation process)

Then you need to hit ENTER.

OFFTOPIC: The lack of a clickable OK or LOGIN button here makes this window unintuitive.

[vieuxrichard]

Thanks for that. I clicked on the other user ID and the system allowed me in with the password I created.
Then I get a screen explaining that PCLOS is a rolling release and that I should run the Synaptic Package Manager.
I follow the instructions and I am asked to login as root (Command /usr/sbin/synaptic ).
I then get the Synaptic menu with a stack of apps in the right window, 4 options in the left (All, Installed, Installed (local or obsolete) & Not installed) and "no package is selected" in the bottom window.. Problem is the original screen has disappeared, so I haven't clue what to choose now (or how to get that screen back, which gave the install instructions)

[vieuxrichard]

Ok, since posting this reply, I have found an excellent video that talks you through the Synaptic package install:

PClinuxOS KDE 2012.02....Does What It Say's On The Tin..

So thanks to everyone for helping me get PCLinux OS 2012 KDE installed. I will close this post now - no doubt I'll be back on the forum with some more questions once I start getting into PCLOS.

[GermanTux]

Thank you kjp, xenaflux & menotu. So following your advice I increased the System Base Memory to 800MB & the Video Memory to 30MB.
These changes enabled me to get as far as the PcLinuxOS Installation Wizard that appeared in 3 windows at the same time.
The Drak/ive install proposed to choose a file system and a partition (what partition?). I had to choose between Ext4/XFS/SWAP/Windows/Other/Empty. When I clicked on each one they all gave an Error message, except Empty which gave a Warning message. Oh dear, except there is an option to Auto Allocate - which I chose. Another Error - this time: "not enough free space"
The storage for the .vdi is 6MB dynamically allocated.
So I saved the state and await further guidance. FYI on C: drive there is currently 21GB free.

To be honest your aging hardware is probably an issue, but to be more direct you need a larger virtual hard drive (.vdi file) than 6 GB.  I recommend between 10 and 12 for a new KDE installation.  Also, when it gives installation options, select use entire disk. 

Also, when creating a new machine, try type - "Linux" and version "Linux 2.6"  This will give you the most generic hardware type, and could be of assistance. 

[sling-shot]

http://pclinuxoshelp.com/index.php/Update_Your_PCLinuxOS

Go to the above page and read carefully. You get everything needed there.