DSpace is an open source digital resource repository that has wide acceptance especially amongst universities. There is also a DSpace Live CD made available for free by Aberystwyth University. This has a self contained image of a Fedora installation with DSpace pre-installed. A machine can be booted from the CD to experiment with DSpace. Unfortunately, the Live CD cannot run under Microsoft Virtual PC, it comes up with an error: An unrecoverable processor error has been encountered. The virtual machine will be reset now. This is a bit of a show stopper. But panic not as there is a way around it.
I found some help in a blog called The Sean Blog on TechNet blogs. There was some helpful information, but I still had problems, especially with the Graphics. After reading thru all the comments in the blog I was able to refine it to work for the DSpace Live CD. This is what I got.
- When the initial menu comes up with the option to Start DSpace Live CD, click F4 Modes and select Safe graphics mode and click Enter.
- Click F6 Other options. This will bring up the boot options line on the screen:
The following needs to be added to the end of the boot options, but before the final -- (double hyphen):
noreplace-paravirt vga=0x32D clocksource=pit
Now click Enter.
Thats all that you have to do. Apart from have patience as it takes quite a while to boot. There will be a black screen for about a minute depending upon your system, then the DSpace login screen will appear and everything is up and running.
