Fedora 8 on VMware Fusion
Along with Ubuntu and Mandriva I recently installed a Fedora 8 virtual machine under VMware Fusion. I’m installing Fedora 8 on VMware Fusion 1.1 which is running on my 13″ MacBook.
The VMware Wizard runs just as it did for Ubuntu and Mandriva so you can see the screen shots in those posts. The only difference was in the choice of guest OS. I picked Redhat as the Linux to install since Fedora itself wasn’t a choice.
Once the Fedora 8 ISO image I was using booted the Fedora install kicked off. Unlike my previous installs I chose to install all the available options, which were: Office & Productivity, Software Development, and Web Server. The screen shots from the Fedora install are below. Click the thumbnail for the full size image.
Then I installed the VMware tools from the RPM package which generated a security warning,
After installing the software from the RPM package it’s necessary to configure the VMware Tools by running vmware-config-tools.pl as root. Like Mandriva, the configuration didn’t recognize the kernel. But this time when I said I wanted to build the kernel it let me. No doubt because I had installed the software development tools. When answering the questions in the script I accepted all the defaults and didn’t have a problem. At the end of the config script there are instructions on how to restart networking. The following commands need to be run from terminal before the network could be used:
/etc/init.d/network stop
rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/network start
After this everything worked fine and the VMware tools could be invoked with the command /usr/bin/vmware-toolbox from terminal. Some options, such as shrinking a disk are only available when run a root.
5 Responses to “Fedora 8 on VMware Fusion”
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Many thanks,all works on my MacBook with your help,though the rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
modprobe vmxnet
did not work?
I chose ‘Other Linux’ Kernel 2.6 xx 64 bit’
I followed your instructions but I can’t seem to get screen autofit/resize to work. Drag and drop also does not work.
Does autofit/resize and drag-and-drop work for you?
@robrob
Autofit doesn’t work if I drag the vmware window itself to be larger or smaller. If I go into Fedora settings and change the resolution then the vmware window resizes itself. Prior to VMware tools the vmware window would stay the same size and add scroll bars or a black border.
Not exactly sure where you mean for drag/drop. It works fine within Fedora for me. If I create a shared folder (I usually don’t use them with Linux) I could also drag from it to a Fedora directory from within Fedora. The permissions it mounts with by default don’t let me write to it even though I told vmware not to make it read-only. No drag/drop between OS X and Fedora but I didn’t expect that to work.
The reason the auto-resize and drag and drop functions do not work very well is because vmware is mainly configured around virtualizing Windows… at least the version for the macintosh is.
Parallels is the same way. For some reason, Windows seems to be the main os that emulators wrap them selves around best.
I hope that helps explain it a little.