hp-laptop-1037930_1280Well that was a struggle and I think worth passing on. I am in the process of setting up an Oracle development platform on my HP Laptop. As ever with a demo environment I like to use Oracle’s VirtualBox. It works well, is free to use and their are a good selection of ready built environments available.

However, on firing up VirtualBox and trying to create an Oracle Linux 7 environment I found I was only ever presented with 32bit options for the OS. How could this be, I have Windows 10 Pro 64 bit installed – and checked. I am sure I installed 64 bit everything.

For some reason HP have chosen to create a BIOS option to turn Virtualisation on and off. The fact that it was off did not stop Oracle Virtualbox from working, just restricted it to 32bit operating systems. After a reboot whilst manically hitting the F10 key bought up the BIOS configuration screen. Turned the Virtualisation option on and all is well. I did notice there was an option to boot from a USB Diskette – whatever that might be.

It is a long time since I had to go into the BIOS options,been working in the MacOS world for too long. What has happened to the myriad of options we used to get on a PC to control a large manner of things? Anyway, VirtualBox is now working and I have the Oracle Development virtual machine from KScope 15 imported. Now to install Weblogic Infrastructure and Forms & Reports 12c Services.

I then plan to install Forms demo and upload to PITSS.CON – all part of my ramp up and rediscovery of repository based development