Server Installation

Now that you've met all the prerequisites for being able to install your first Concerto server, we'll proceed to the software set up side of things.

Getting the VM Image

Go to http://www.concerto-signage.org/deploy and download, onto your Linux server, the OVA file. The easiest way may be to copy the link location on whatever workstation you're sitting at (if that's not the actual Linux box), and then use wget to pull the file down. If you're on the server console, then it's easier, obviously. The last time I pulled in the OVA from there, it was the current (in July '18) 2.3.6 release. I've not yet checked the .tgz and .img format files to see if they're presently up to date as well; you really want 2.3.6 for a first install, a number of annoying bugs were fixed in .5 and .6.

That release is actually a tarball, so use 'tar xvf' to unpack it, so you can get to the disk image.

Or, you can use virt-convert (which is part of one of the virtualization packages you should already have installed; if not, FIXME) to convert the .vmdk disk image file inside it into a .qcow2 file, like so:

$ sudo virt-convert -D qcow2 concerto_server.ova

You can skip sudo if you own the directory you're working in, of course.

Once you have a .qcow2 disk image file, you need to create the virtual machine to attach it to. Here will will address how you do that using the graphical virt-manager tool. It can also be done using commandline tools, if you prefer. (FIXME: can someone else write that? :-)

Creating the VM

In order to run the virtual machine, you need to create a control file for it, so that the hypervisor knows what resources to emulate. Here, we're assuming that you have a Unix commandline on the host server, either in a terminal emulator on the box (running under an X server), or that you are connected to the box from a Windows PC (using an emulator like PuTTY and an X server like Xming) or a Mac (using an emulator like iTerm or terminal, ssh, and an X server like XQuartz). FIXME: writeups or pointers on how to set that up.

Log in to the host server -- we call it that because, in a VM environment, each physical machine has a Host OS, and then runs one to many virtual machines, each running a Guest OS. We'll try always to specify whether we're talking about the host or a guest, because HOWTOs which don't give me hives.

Once you've gotten to a prompt on the host, it's time to create the VM.

First, you launch virt-manager, as your own user. Assuming that $DISPLAY was set properly by your SSH session into the host (if you're on the host console, this is automatic), you will get a virt-manager window on the screen, which looks like this:

[ There will be a screenshot here as soon as I figure out how. ]

MORE TO COME