JEOS stands for Just Enough Operating System.  It is  great environment for building virtual machines without all the clutter of a windowing system, games, office products, etc.  It is from Ubuntu and you install it using the Ubuntu server install, but rather than picking a standard install, press F4 and choose “Install a minimal system.”

Note: The “Install a minimal virtual machine” is specific to VMWare and I plan to use VirtualBox.

Be sure to include Open SSH in the install so that it installs sshd.

*** Also, if you plan to install XE, you’ll need to modify the partitions to have a larger swap space (at least 1.5 G). ***

Once the install is done, I find it useful to install a few other items.

Update Ubuntu

apt-get update

Install some other tools

apt-get openjdk-6-jre

Yes, java will be included in any of the WebLogic installs, but I need this one if I want to do remote display (for config wizards, etc).

apt-get gcc

Some apps require to rebuild the kernel modules, so you’ll need a basic compiler.

Install guest additions (Choose the VirtualBox Devices->Install Guest Additions…” option.  This sets up a /dev/cdrom or /dev/cdrom1.  You’ll need to manually mount this temporarily:

sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt

Then run the linux .bin file.

Update nofile limits.  Most java apps fail with the standard ubuntu settings:

edit /etc/security/limits.conf and add these lines at the end:

*     soft nofile 65535
*     hard nofile 65535
root  soft nofile 65535
root  hard nofile 65535

These numbers are very high and I wouldn’t do this on a production system, but for this environment it is fin.

To get rid of the annoying piix error on boot, add the following line to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file

blacklist i2c_piix4