However, you want to do it. You need to start off with an image file. At minimum you need about 25% of the GNOME packages installed to start a desktop. I created mine with qemu. It is quick and easy. The only problem I had is my image would not boot with QEMU once created. However, since I wanted to use coLinux, I did not consider that a serious problem. If you want to start off with a pre-build image, try the source forge Fedora Core 6 image at: The download size is about 330 MB. The FedoraCore6.img extracts as a 4GB file.