Setting up SUSE Linux as a VMware Guest

From openSUSE

Installing SUSE Linux as a VMware Workstation guest operating system is mostly easy. However, certain aspects of the process, such as setting up VMware Tools, may be somewhat unintuitive. This page is intended to help you make your SUSE Linux guest operating system work as smoothly as possible.

Note: Since SUSE 11.0, an open source version of VMware tools (vmware-kmp) is installed by default if you install the system inside VMware.

Creating the VMware Virtual Machine for SUSE Linux

This section should explain the optimal settings for running SUSE Linux as a guest.

Installing SUSE Linux in a VMware Virtual Machine

This section should document only the highlevel steps, and then refer to the normal setup instructions for SUSE Linux. We'll get to this later, since it's the easiest part.

There are some good screenshots of installing RC1 and RC2 into VMware 5.5 here.

Set Up VMware Tools on a SUSE Linux Guest

Install the Packages Required for Building Kernel Modules

On the guest SUSE Linux system. install the following packages. The Software Management tool in YaST makes this easy to do.

• binutils
• gcc
• gcc-c++
• kernel-source
• make

Make sure that your Kernel is up to date.

Your kernel version must match the version of the kernel-source packages. To know which version of the kernel you are running, type:

uname -a

in a terminal window.

When you select the kernel version in yast2, click on the "Version" tab, and make sure that you are installing the same version that matches your running kernel. The defaults version downloaded is sometimes incorrect.

Install the VMware Tools Package

1. In the VMware Workstation console, click on the VM menu, then select Install VMware Tools.

• If you have multiple workstations installed, make sure that you have switched to the tab for the workstation in which you want to install the VMware Tools.

Your SUSE Linux guest system should have mounted a (virtual) CD, which will appear on the guest system's desktop.

2. In the guest system, double-click the CD on the desktop to open it in the file manager.

3. Do not use the RPM package to install VMware tools, the package contains dependencies to kernel modules which will overwrite your currently installed kernel.

4. Right click on VMwareTools-6.0.2-59824.tar.gz archive and extract it into into /tmp/VMwareTools.

Run the VMware Tools configuration script

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_newguest_tools_linux.html

1. Open a terminal as root and configure VMware Tools by running:

su 
cd /tmp/VMwareTools/vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl

2. Respond to the questions the installer displays on the screen. Press Enter to accept the default value. Note: Be sure to respond yes when the installer offers to run the configuration program.

3. To launch the VMware Tools background application:

vmware-toolbox &

Note: Some guest operating systems require a reboot for full functionality.

Troubleshooting the VMware tools configuration script

While running the configuration script, you may encounter an error similar to this one while trying to build some of the VMware tools:

The directory of kernel headers (version @@VMWARE@@ UTS_RELEASE) does not match your running kernel (version 2.6.18.2-34-default). Even if the module were to compile successfully, it would not load into the running kernel.

One possible reason for this is that the version of the kernel-source downloaded in the previous step did not match the version of your running kernel. Go back into yast2, search for "kernel-source", click on the "versions" tab, and select the currently running version of the kernel from the selection of radio boxes.

Another possible reason for this is because some kernel header configurations in the default header directory do not include the file utsrelease.h, which specifies the release version. The folder that contains the correct version information should look like this:

/usr/src/linux-obj/i386/<version name>/include/linux

You should find the folder that matches your version's name, and enter that path at the prompt.

If you try to install the vmware-tools from ESX3, it's possible that the vmware-config-tools script fails to compile the modules with an error about a missing config.h (depends of the version)

Use the following patches+instructions to fix this: http://www.astroarch.com/virtual/patches.html

Tips & Tricks

Switching between sessions on the guest system

• The normal Ctrl-Alt-F1 or Ctrl-Alt-F2 keys do not work on a guest system. (If your VMware host is Linux, they will actually do their normal function on the host OS.)
• Hold Ctrl+Alt and hit Space and then F1 (or Fn) without releasing Ctrl+Alt. This will invoke the Ctrl-Alt-F1 on the guest OS.