Thursday, August 31, 2006

installing VMWare Server

I installed VMWare Server on my XP box at work to get Fedora Core running as the guest OS. The software is free on VMWare's site (www.vmware.com) and installation was easy as I had done it before. I used a Bridged connection to create a new virtual NIC which automatically recognized my companies' DHCP server. I allocated about 80GB for the server, as it may do some video editing in off hours.

Don't forget to install VMWare Tools. This optimizes display and mouse functionality and better integrates the guest operating system. This article was helpful in getting the Tools installed:
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws4/doc/new_guest_tools_ws.html

However, the information is kind of old, as the names of the Tools installer have changed from the old tarball to a nice RPM for Fedora. For some reason, rpm couldn't see the rpm file as it existed in /mnt. So I moved it to temp. Note: first unmount your VMWare virtual CD before you execute the install, or you'll get a bunch of inode errors, as if the install is trying to access media that is not there anymore.

Later, I also tried to shrink the size of the virtual disk. Even though Snapshots was disabled, the vmware-toolbox did not allow me to do this. Perhaps this is because the disk was preallocated? I'm not sure, but this article helped:
http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=375598

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