Raspberry Pi 1 B+ and CentOS

[nisryus]

So I am trying to get into Linux (work required I start learning RH or CentOS) and realized my trusty i5 3450S doesn't support VT-D. Well, bye bye VirtualBox.

Fired up my old Raspberry Pi 1 B+, used Etcher to put CentOS 7 on the SD card. It tried to boot and won't load. Well, darn it. Searched a lot of guides and most are for Pi 3 or 4.

Maybe my old Pi is not cutting it? I put OSMC on it and it is working ok, slow but acceptable.

has anyone has RH or CentOS 7/8 running on their old Pis?

 

[ultimatebob]

Are you sure that the ARM distribution of CentOS 7 works on a Raspberry Pi 1? I thought that you needed at least a Raspberry Pi 2 to make that work.

Personally, I'd ditch the Pi and just spin up an CentOS 7 instance in Google Cloud or Azure and use that instead. That wouldn't cost you a dime as a new user, since both of those services offer free service credits for new account signups.

 

[nisryus]

Yeah, most people were using Pi 2 or above, I was trying to see if it works on a Pi 1. Appearantly not. =/

I did tried AWS, but want to setup my own lab at home without spending too much.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

So I am trying to get into Linux (work required I start learning RH or CentOS) and realized my trusty i5 3450S doesn't support VT-D. Well, bye bye VirtualBox.

Do you really need VT-d (as in Virtual Directed I/O)? Ivy Bridge supports VT-x (even has EPT/SLAT) just fine, so there shouldn't be any issues with running VirtualBox.

 

[nisryus]

I have VT-x on but VB still won't let me run any guest OS. (i tried 32 bit)

My son's system is a Haswell and i was able to setup VB just fine (enabled both VT-x and VT-d). I checked BIOS and other OS settings as well.

I will keep fiddling with the OS and BIOS settings.

 

[ultimatebob]

Perhaps you can try an older version of VirtualBox? I've used that software on old Core 2 Duo systems before, so that VT-D requirement must be new.

 

[nisryus]

After spending an hour fiddling, I tried bob's suggest and installed VB5.2.

Boom! I was able to make a CentOS 7 VM. Afterward I tried 6.1 again, and it won't let me start a VM. Guess I will stick with 5.2 for now.

Thanks bob!