In preparation for the Boston TrixBox seminar, I’m setting up my laptop to run TrixBox. Think about this concept for a moment… I’m going to run a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as a virtual machine on my three-year old Dell laptop, and on top of that run the Asterisk/Trixbox PBX server. This is mind-boggling on a several levels.

The minimum recommended specs for doing this include 1 gigabyte of memory and a 2.4 gigabyte processor. I’m hoping it will still be functional with my 2 gig laptop processor…it is a little late to go out and replace my laptop.

I’ve downloaded and installed the VMWare player.
I’ve downloaded and installed the TrixBox. Zip file which contains four files:
* Red Hat Enterprise NVRAM File (which I’m assuming is some kind of memory emulator)
* VMWare virtual disk file,
* VMSD File
* VMX configuration file.

Clicking on the VMX configuration file, starts the configuration process. This looks identical to the setup process that you run when installing TrixBox on a standalone machine.

The next snag comes up when the CentOS installer complains about a network card driver. I accepted “Remove Configuration”, and it immediately came back and said it would attempt to configure the card again. At this point I get the blank screen asking for network information.

There is no direction on this in the installation instructions so I just accept the dynamic configuration for now.

This is accepted, and the boot sequence for CentOS continues smoothly. I see that eth0 starts up.

A few more minutes, and the login CentOS login prompt appears. I login with user name=root, and password = trixbox

The web interface is also available on the local IP address for the virtual machine

This shows the handsome new front page of the 2.2 interface. Click on the image to see it full size.