I always live in hope that just one day, the folks over at Fedora will actually have a pain free VMWare installation. Not to be. Here’s how to do it with the minimal gnashing of teeth.
Bugs that get you before anything else
On VMWare Fusion 5, currently Fedora 18 x86_64 Live DVD’s graphical installer will boot and then gets stuck at a blue GUI screen if you have 3D acceleration turned on (which is the default if you choose Linux / Fedora 64 bit).
- Virtual Machine -> Settings -> Display -> disable 3D acceleration.
We’ll come back to this after the installation of VMWare Tools
Installing Fedora 18 in VMWare Fusion / VMWare Workstation 8
The installation is pretty straight forward … as long as you can see it.
The only non-default choice I’d like you to change is to set your standard user up to be in the administrators group (it’s a checkbox during installation). Being in the administrators group allows sudo to run. If you don’t want to do this, drop sudo from the beginning of all of the commands below, and use “su -” to get a root shell instead.
The new graphical installer still has a few bugs:
- Non-fatal – On the text error message screen (Control-Alt-F2) there’s an error message from grub2 (still!) about grub2 file not found /boot/grub2/locale/en.mo.gz. This will not prevent installation, so just ignore it for now (which the Fedora folks have for a couple of releases!). Go back to the live desktop screen by using Control-Alt-F1
- PITA – Try not to move the installer window offscreen as it’s difficult to finish the installation if even a little off screen. If you get stuck, press tab until you hit the “Next” button – or just reboot and start again
Once you have Fedora installed, login and open a terminal window (Activities -> type in “Terminal”)
sudo yum update sudo reboot sudo yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc make sudo reboot
Fix missing kernel headers
At least for now, VMware Tools 9.2.2 build-893683 will moan about a path not found error for the kernel headers. Let’s go ahead and fix that for you:
sudo cp /usr/include/linux/version.h /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include/linux/
NB: The backtick (`) executes the command “uname -r” to make the above work no matter what your kernel version is.
NB: Some highly ranked and well meaning instructions want you to install the x86_64 or PAE versions of kernel devel or kernel headers when trying to locate the correct header files. This is not necessary for the x86_64 kernel on Fedora 18, which I am assuming you’re using as nearly everything released by AMD or Intel for the last six years is 64 bit capable. Those instructions might be relevant to your interests if you are using the 32 bit i686 version or PAE version of Fedora 18.
Mount VMWare Tools
Make sure you have the latest updates installed in VMWare before proceeding!
- Virtual Machine -> Install VMWare Tools
Fedora 18 mounts removable media in a per-user specific location (/run/media/<username>/<volume name>), so you need to know your username and the volume name
Build VMWare Tools
Click on Activities, and type Terminal
tar zxf /run/media/`whoami`/VMware\ Tools/VMw*.tar.gz cd vmware-tools-distrib sudo ./vmware-install.pl
Make sure everything compiled okay, and if so, restart:
sudo reboot
NB: The backtick (`) executes the command “whoami” to make the above work no matter what your username is.
No 3D Acceleration oh noes!1!! Install Cinnamon or Mate
Now, all the normal VMWare Tools will work. Unfortunately, after all the faffing about, I didn’t manage working 3D acceleration. I ended up installing something a bit lighter than Gnome 3.6, which requires hardware 3D acceleration.
- Activities -> Software -> Packages -> Cinnamon for a more modern desktop appearance or
- Activities -> Software -> Packages -> MATE for old school Gnome 2 desktop appearance
- Apply
- Logout
- From the session pull down, change across to Cinnamon or Mate and log back in
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