A Mariner Story - Part II

The first thing to do in exploring Mariner is to actually run it. This is relatively easy to do given that the Mariner team offers an already built ISO image and also the possibility to build such an image from sources. I opted to use the pre-built ISO.

A Hyper-V runner

The next step is to boot the ISO image into a VM runner. Oracle VirtualBox is good enough on Ubuntu so I tried it but ... I had to reinstall:

• dkms
• virtualbox-dkms ...

... and then I had to add the new MOK key to allow the kernel load the VirtualBox-specific drivers securely.

Booting ... not

After these corrections one might think Mariner ISO will boot on VirtualBox just like that. Not really ...

In my case the boot loader was spinning continuously asking me to type F12 to select a boot drive and the only drive available was the HDD which, obviously, was not bootable at the time.

A detail no one talks about

The fix consisted in ticking the System | Enable EFI (special OSes only) option in the VM settings because Mariner is a special OS, perhaps.

Once that was done the installer loaded nicely from the ISO and I was able to install this version of Linux on the virtual HDD. Then shutdown, evict the ISO from the virtual optical drive and ...

... lo and behold, ladies and gentlemen, it takes just a few simple steps and only a couple of small annoyances to have a CBL-Mariner instance up and running!

In short, Linux rocks. So does Microsoft.