Our company wanted to test iFax to see if it was going to be a suitable replacement for RightFax, so our first thought was to load it up into Hyper-V. Failure ensued due to their prepackaged ISO not having the right drivers to get the installer going in Hyper-V.

These instructions might be useful if you’re looking to get test iFax’s software. Disclaimer: I have no idea how to get a Brooktrout card working in a virtual environment, so if you need to test that aspect of it, you might be better off getting some cheap hardware (something we ended up doing anyway).

To get iFax up and running in Hyper-V:

1. Go download CentOS 5.9 NoArch system i386 ISO
2. Create a new Virtual Machine with a legacy network adapter and point the OS image to your downloaded ISO.
3. Follow the CentOS installation prompts and basically install a regular CentOS server.
4. Insert iFax installation ISO from the Removable Devices list.
5. Copy CentOS RPMs and HylaFax RPMs to desktop
6. Install the CentOS RPMs first by issuing the command rpm -ivh *.rpm (make sure you navigate to that folder first)
7. Then do the same for the HylaFax RPMs
8. You’ll need to install the listed dependencies by copying and pasting what’s missing into a “yum install [dependency name here]” (there’s quite a few)
9. Remove GUI if you installed one by “nano /etc/inittab” and changing 5 to 3.
10. Reboot

Once you reboot, the iFax environment will pull up, and from there you should be able to follow the rest of the iFax installation instructions.

Hope this helps!