Install and Use VMware's VMPlayer In PCLinuxOS – 2531 days old

[BobGuy]

I finally installed the VMware.com/ Player RPM in PCLinuxOS 0.92 the other day. Now don't get me wrong, I'd much rather have the VMware Workstation, but the player is free and the workstation last I heard was $199.00 - they do have the 30 day trial but I wanted something that didn't time bomb out in 30 days, and the player is it.

The workstation can create virtual machines and run them, the player can not, but if a copy of that virtual machine is sent to another computer that has the player installed, be it windows or Linux, that computer can run the operating system that was created in the workstation, in the virtual machine player. And it will be the exact same OS on both (or thousands of) computers. Think install, customize once, deploy as many times as you would like. I wouldn't have bothered with VMPlayer if I couldn't create my own virtual machines. With all the open source software out there you just knew it had to happen at some point in time.

Here is what I had to do to get VMPlayer up and running in PCLinuxOS.
As always, Your mileage may vary!

1. Install the latest kernel from the repositorys.

2. Download VMware-player-1.0.1-19317.i386.rpm (34.6 MB) and install it.
md5sum: 5ff97d1b4dd1e56de22c111252c3c077

(The tarball download will work on any Linux distro capable of running the software. I chose the RPM. The only drawback of using the rpm is that you don't get any control over where the software is going to be installed. In most cases this is not a problem. With the tarball, you run an install script and you can specify the installation path and other useful settings. If you want or need more control grab the tarball. Your choice.)

3. Edit the vmware-config.pl file.
4. Run the vmware-config.pl so it can properly set up VMPlayer.

So why bother doing virtual machines, well first running a computer inside of a computer is catching on, but mainly because it is to your advantage. There are quite a few nice features that one can do when going virtual. That's because the virtual (guest) operating system is treated as a normal file within your real (host) operating system. VMPlayer refers to Linux as my host OS, any other OS I install is called a guest OS. You can also setup your own virtual server.

In VMPlayer terminology the host operating system is the one you have on your computer. The guest OS is the one that you'll be running under VMPlayer's virtual machine.

You can run just about any guest OS on the host OS, they can even be the same, e.g. you can run Linux under Linux, windows under windows. Oh yes you can also run windows under Linux, or Linux under windows.

Windows 2000, Windows XP and (most) Linux distributions are the only host OS's the software runs on. You can boot just about any guest OS though. The only thing about virtualization is you need a lot of memory.

You'll need enough memory to run both the host and guest OS. If you run Windows XP or the latest distro of Linux, they won't run very well in less than 256 MB. And livecd's in VMPlayer feel sluggish with only 256 MB of ram, with 512 MB or more they fly along nicely.

I can boot up a copy of GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, or even a copy of Windows. When I run a guest OS under VMPlayer, VMPlayer tricks / fools the guest OS into believing it's running on a physical piece of computer hardware all by itself and speaking to real devices. (emulation)

VMPlayer's guest OS has an Ethernet card, a hard drive, a sound card, USB, a CD drive, printer port, a keyboard and mouse. I can install multiple guest OS's, but I can only run one guest OS at time, the primary limitations will be how much physical disk space and ram you have available. VMPlayer's guest OS can have their own IP addresses (bridged) which make them indistinguishable from any other physical machine, you can also do NAT, or keep it on your LAN (off the Internet) with the (host only) setting, your choice.

What the guest OS sees as a hard disk is really one large file on the physical hard drive. This also means no partitioning necessary on the host OS! When you create your guest OS using VMPlayer what you are really doing is installing it in a file named whatever you choose, be it Test, kubuntu, windows, Linux, whatever it's just another file name on your hard drive. Think of it like a 3GB mp3 file sitting on your hard drive, unless you are using it it just sits there waiting doing nothing and not using any system resources.

If your guest OS is 4GB and you add 6GB of data then it will require 10GB of hard drive storage space. The math is easy, the unfortunate part is that you have to allocate that 10GB during the install part, if you don't and only allocate 6GB then it will not be large enough to hold more data. So having a large hard drive is very helpful! I'll get to this part later in the article.

VMPlayer does like its memory, more is always better, I usually allocate 448 - 512MB of memory for the guest OS. I do have 1GB of physical ram in my computer. YMMV

There is no free lunch. Operating systems running under a virtual machine will always be slower than it would be if it was running natively on your PC! Right now I have 2 operating systems running at the same time, but I don't have 2 physical computers.

All of the guest OS's don't run at the same time, they can't, for that you need VMware Workstation and a lot of system resources if you want to run more than 2 OS's at the same time. You can choose to run a guest OS or not, it will sit there on your hard drive waiting. You can have as many OS's as you have room for them on your hard drive.

For instance using a virtual machine:
Can put a end to dual booting into another operating system just to get some information out of a database, or use some feature that is lacking in a GNU/Linux box. Just click on the VMPlayer icon and go virtual.

This sure beets logging out, rebooting and logging in to another OS.

Back up your guest OS simply by making a copy of it and storing that copy elsewhere, just like you would save your mp3's or documents, it's a file remember? If the guest OS gets corrupted, delete it and copy back your backup. Simple!

Before all of this warm fuzziness can happen, I had to upgrade the kernel first. The reason is because of the default PCLinuxOS kernel which uses low memory for 1 gig of ram aka up-1GB. For most people with 1 gig of ram this would be desireable, because new Linux users wouldn't know how to replace or recompile the kernel to get the full 1GB usage of their ram.

VMPlayer will not work with this kernel the way it is setup to handle 1GB of ram, so I just installed the i686-up-4GB kernel and the stripped sources, yes you will need the the stripped sources for this, problem solved. Because there is the newer kernel version I opted to install the newer one instead of recompiling the original one that was installed by default.

As a user use rpm -qa | grep kernel to see what kernel you now have installed.

$ rpm -qa | grep kernel
kernel-pclos-i686-up-4GB-2.6.13.oci2.mdk-1-1tex
kernel-pclos-source-stripped-2.6-2.6.13-oci2.mdk-1-1tex

You will also need to install if these are not already installed by default...

$ rpm -qa | grep gcc
gcc-cpp-3.3.1-2mdk
libgcc1-3.3.1-2mdk
gcc-3.3.1-2mdk
gcc-c++-3.3.1-2mdk

I installed these six RPM's using Synaptic from the PCLinuxOS repository and they work fine.

Now that the updates to the OS and the new kernel have been installed it's time to install VMPlayer.

Download VMPlayer to a directory, I used /home/bob. Now run the md5sum check.

The numbers match from the vmware site, so this is not a corrupted download.
Open Konqueror the file manager.

Next... right click on the VMware-player-1.0.1-19317.i386.rpm and select KPackage.

NOTE: KPackage is not the recommended way to do your updates in PCLinuxOS, for that use the, Synaptic Package Manager!

What KPackage is used for is programs like this that have been designed not to interfere with your system when you install 3rd party RPM's. Just because you grab a RPM from some site doesn't mean that it will properly install in a system that uses the rpm package manager. You have been warned.


Click on the Install button.

I clicked to hilite the VMwarePLayer entry then clicked on the Install button again.
Next I'm greeted with the root password dialog box.

Enter the root password here, click on OK.

NOTE: the RESULT=0 above, that means the the rpm was successfully installed.

Now I have the updated PCLinuxOS kernel, and the VMPlayer installed.

[BobGuy]

The hard part is done, the kernel was upgraded and VMware Player was just installed. Now you have to do a simple edit to the vmware-config.pl file. Open the file manager in super user mode, you will need root privileges for this.

It's located in /usr/bin

Right click and select KEdit for the text editor. Make sure the word wrap setting is set to disabled. Having the word wrap working will really mess up this file when you save it!


Now comment out the return line by putting a # at the beginning of the line, like so.

The #| that you see in the snap shot is the cursor, it blinks and it just happened to get caught while I was taking the snap shot.

I used the find function (edit-> find) to locate...
'not have the same address space size as your running '

After you added the # sign, save the change and then exit KEdit, all done here.

The reason I needed to comment out # the return ' ' ; line is because this causes it to refuse to compile the modules on PCLinuxOS, but may not be necessary on other distros. This is why choices like 1 Gig lowmem are a bad idea because they can break external modules. It's why I had to upgrade my kernel before I installed VMPlayer.

Next it's time to run the vmware-config.pl script.
Open the Konsole if it is not already open and type in vmware-config.pl - easy huh?

OK time to click on Session then New Root Shell.

When the Root Shell opens type in the root password and press the enter key.

Now type in vmware-config.pl again.

Use the space bar to get to the end of the EULA after you read it page by page.

Enter y to accept the license and continue.
See where it says [/usr/share/icons] ?
That's where it wants to install the icons, just press the enter key to accept this location. Its what I did for PCLinuxOS.

Do the same for [/usr/applications] and [/usr/share/pixmaps]

Next question type in yes
Remember the new kernel stripped sources I installed at the beginning? Well here are the modules that it needs so just press the enter key here to accept the default.

This script will build and install the needed modules in your kernel.
Next we want networking so that we can get out onto the Internet.
I typed in yes here.

Yes you want NAT included. type in yes here.

Yes let it probe, but only once. say no to configure another NAT network.

Answer yes yes no to these questions.
After you type in no, it goes and builds the module.

Wait it out, it only took about a minute to finish.

I said no to the Google search bar.


Great it's finally done. And it only has to be done one time. Exit out of the root shell. You run that /usr/bin/vmplayer command as a normal user. But you need a OS to boot virtually while using VMPlayer, and it's time to add some.

[BobGuy]

Now it's time to create our .vmx file, this is easy as its web based.
Head on over to... EasyVMX and create your own.

EasyVMX! creates virtual machines to run in VMware Player.
The reason that we need to do this is because VMPlayer can't do this, but VMware Workstation can. It's the difference between free and pay for software.

All you need to do is fill in the fields, and click "Create Virtual Machine".
Easy huh?

Virtual Machine Name: The name you want to show up in the title bar on VMPlayer.
Select GuestOS: Use the drop down button and make your selection.
Memory size: that you assign to your virtual machine.
# of CPU's: Only 1 CPU Can be used in the player.


I filled in the name of the distro that I will be using.

You want Bridged here, I left the default vlance.
If you have more than 1 Ethernet card in your computer. Click Enable.

I have a floppy disk, so I enabled this.
Use the drop down and choose your device /dev/fd0 for me.

Use the drop down button and select the location of your CDROM/DVD.
Enable CDROM #2, this way you can install your downloaded .iso's without having to burn it to a CD-R first, just install it from the .iso on your hard drive. Sweet!

I left the .iso entry the way it is, the alternative is to type in the full path to the .iso


How much hard drive space do you have? I have only 14GB left so I can't create and expect to work a 20GB virtual hard drive. Find out how much you have.



I only have 1 hard drive, select how much disk space you want to give to your guest OS. You can't change disk size later.

Do not enable the SCSI check box!
It is irrelevant whether you have a SCSI hard disk or not. It's a virtual disk and the physical disk doesn't matter (it's the host OS that manages that). I would always use IDE for virtual machines, it's less driver overhead. It does not matter how fast your disks are either, the virtual disk access is going to be the bottleneck.

Remember when I said...
If your guest OS is 4GB and you add 6GB of data then it will require 10GB of hard drive storage space. The unfortunate part is that you have to allocate that 10GB during the install part, if you don't and only allocate 6GB then it will not be large enough to hold more data. I'll get to this part later in the article. Well now you know why.


These were already set this way, read why just above this shot at the website.
I have no serial port 2 on this hardware, and I'll never miss it, if you have 2 serial ports, it will probably be enabled. The parallel port is your printer.

Leave USB: enabled, but choose Disable USB Autoconnect if it is not already selected.

Now click on Create Virtual Machine. It took about 3 seconds to generate the test.zip file.

Right click test.zip and save link as... to your hard drive.
Head over to where you saved the zip file and unzip it.

Here are the files it created in /home/bob/virtual/test/

Next you need to do a small edit in the test.vmx file.
Open the text.vmx file with KEdit as a user.

# Settings for the optional virtual CDROM, ISO-image
ide1:1.fileName = ".iso"
ide1:1.startConnected = "FALSE"

Change this to true.
ide1:1.startConnected = "TRUE"

Change ide1:1.fileName = ".iso"

To where your kubuntu or any other OS you downloaded is located.
You need the full path. Such as /home/bob/iso/kubuntu-6.06-desktop-i386.iso

ide1:1.fileName = "/home/bob/iso/kubuntu-6.06-desktop-i386.iso"

It's all one line.
The complete changes should look like this.

# Settings for the optional virtual CDROM, ISO-image
ide1:1.present = "TRUE"
ide1:1.fileName = "/home/bob/iso/kubuntu-6.06-desktop-i386.iso"
ide1:1.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
ide1:1.mode = "persistent"
ide1:1.startConnected = "TRUE"

When you select the Test.vmx in VMPlayer it will now goto and open the kubuntu .iso and start loading it when you select it in the handy dandy dialog box.

After you have installed your guest OS change the...
ide1:1.startConnected = "TRUE"
Back to false.
ide1:1.startConnected = "FALSE"

Now I'm cooking with gas!
Time to load up Kubuntu and give it a test drive.

Open the Konsole and...

[BobGuy]

Finally it's time to actually use VMPlayer.
Open the Konsole as a user and type in:
/usr/bin/vmplayer

[bob@jan's_sex_clinic ~]$ /usr/bin/vmplayer

You may or may not see any error messages.
After the first time you launch VMPlayer you can use the old ALT+F2 key combo.

Type in vmplayer, click on run.

Many Linux distros have different menu structures and to work in different distros and desktop environments the icon was not installed by default.

I had to create my own icon for that one click sunset riverbank made in the shade with lemon aid feel.

Your choice. Make the icon or use ALT+F2.

After you launch VMPlayer you will come to the
Open Virtual Machine dialog box. Here is where you select your .vmx

Click your way through to where your .vmx is located.

Test.vmx was already hilited for me, click on Open.
I press the enter key and keep going.

Kubuntu is a livecd that can be installed.
Give it some time to load, just like your regular OS, this is not instant.

When it's time to quit the virtual machine, just logout, shutdown like you would normally.

Now I have a way to test out many distributions, if I like one it will get installed, if I don't the file gets deleted and I get my limited hard drive space back. Either way its a winning situation.

Here are a few links to screen shots using vmplayer that are to large for this thread.

http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~bobguy/vm/boot7.png
http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~bobguy/vm/boot8.png
http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~bobguy/vm/dsl11.png
http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~bobguy/vm/dsl13.png
http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~bobguy/vm/nother1.png

Well I have to go knock over a gas station now, cause I need a new 200GB WD hard drive. My old one is running out of room to fast.

[BobGuy]

Yesterday I had a power outage for about 2 minutes. Powered up and my system was fine. After a couple of hours I decided to run VMPlayer and after I clicked on my handy dandy desktop icon to launch it, nothing. Not what I wanted.

Opened the Konsole and tried to launch it that way to see what the problem was.

Here is the problem, what exactly caused it, I don't know, but it was easy to fix.

Now the second time through the configuration it asked different questions. That's because it had already had the EULA, that question was skipped entirely, so I just kept accepting the defaults until I got to this question.

Now last time I just accepted it and it worked but this time I noticed that the path didn't point to the stripped sources I had downloaded. So I put the correct path in and as expected it worked.

/usr/src/linux-2.6.13-oci2.mdk/include

If this power outage incident never happened I wouldn't bother changing this path. It worked fine since June 11th. (looks like it works with either path.)

When I got to the networking part the script said it was already setup and did I want to set it up again. I typed in no and hit the enter key. The vmware-config.pl script finished and VMPlayer was back in business.

Later I decided to make a backup copy of the vmware-config.pl script. A bad script was not the cause of my problem and the script is read only, but for the few KB it is, I made it anyways.

Should I ever need it, it sits next to the original script.


Some times when you least expect it shit happens.