I’ve just spent the best part of 9 hours installing a Fedora Core 3 User Mode Linux (UML) filesystem and configuring it so that it works. It’s been a learning experience for sure, but once I’ve backed up the virtual disks, I can play around with various things like apache2/mod_perl2 without breaking any existing servers and if it all goes horribly wrong, I can just restore the disk back to how it was.

Installing the filesystem from scratch was the worst part of it because you have to make sure all the RPMs are installed in the right orders and dependencies for some of the most basic packages are several screens long. I only installed 500MB onto the virtual disk, and fixing the broken boot sequence (missing fstab among other things) was rather tricky without such essentials as ‘vi’
I have however got the networking sorted on it and up2date is rather busy now installing vi and the various other packages I forgot in my haste to boot from the virtual disk.