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CentOS 4.8 in Virtualbox 5.1.x



Years ago I was part of a project that was developed on and ran on CentOS 4.8. The software we developed was only used in-house so we were able to work around any bugs we found. The development cycle was extremely short, 4 months, considering the end result.

While we've backed up the source frequently over the years the software really never got a major facelift. I spent a bit of time over the years making some minor changes (I gave the menu a facelift changing it from rotating gifs to CSS, and made some code changes to deal with a tax shift that happened years ago), but what the project really needs is a major overhaul.

One of my goals right from the outset was to open source the project, but this didn't happen because I was simply too swamped with other things to completely audit the code. Also I wanted to simplify the project before exposing it to the world. Initially we based the project on an eCommerce suite (OSCommerce). At the time we were using that suite for another project and we thought we'd just export the database to another live site based on the same eCommerce suite. That never happened and the eCommerce suite added many more tables and fields we never ended up using (though we added a few of our own).

This all brings me back to the fact that the project was running on CentOS 4.8, an old version of CentOS (which has been on version 7 for awhile). I struggled getting CentOS 4.8 to install in Virtualbox 5.1.x, mostly because I was trying too hard. CentOS would start to boot then hang with an NMI error. The problem was that I was trying to install using the Linux kernel 2.6/3 as a base when what I really needed to do was just select Red Hat 64 (the default). I was overthinking the installation. When I finally tried the default selection for Virtualbox CentOS 4.8 installed just fine.

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