Installing SUSE Linux 9.1 as a VMware guest

Introduction

This page deals with SUSE 9.3 as the host operating system with VMware 5.5 RC1 installed and shows the hints for a proper installation of SUSE 9.1 as a guest operating system.

Software Selection

First of all you need to be sure, that some software requirements are met. The screenshot shows the additional software groups you should install in addition to the base installation software selection done by YaST. Please be sure to use the test based installation instead of the graphical one.

No YAST after installation

It does not matter when and how: Do not run the YaST Online Update (YOU) during the base installation of the operating system.

Base installation finished

If you have done a default installation, you have now a login screen with 640 x 480 resolution.

Things to do prior to a YOU run

Now type STRG+ALT+F1 to enter a console in the VMware-Session, log in as root and first do a "init 3" and then install the Vmware Tools package.

Run YOU

Reach for YOU and do a complete YOU.

Reboot

Then reboot the virtual machine.

Configure VMware Tools

After the reboot go to a console again, log in as root and type in

cd /usr/src/linux && make cloneconfig && make prepare-all && vmware-config-tools.pl

Answering the first two questions

The first answers to the questions of the VMware Tools script should be "yes", as you need to tell the script where the configured kernel source tree is and if VMWare should compile the necessary modules for you.

Configuring the resolution

Now you may enter a number to describe which resolution you want to use.

Installing the vmnet module

The vmnet module within the VMware session replaces the emulated AMD pcnet32 100 Megabit network interface card with a 1 Gigabit ethernet card thus improving the speed. The vmware-config-tools.pl script says how to enable at the end of proper compiling.

/etc/init.d/network stop
rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
depmod -a
modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/network start

In this case I have written all of the lines into a little shell script ;-)
Please do not be fooled if your DHCP-client cannot get a valid IP-Address anymore after a reboot or if this script says that the vmxnet-module cannot be found in /proc/modules. It really works :-)

VMware Configuration ready

That's all folks - All done :-)

---