Scatterism

What makes VMWare so great is that they officially support many Linux distributions, at least the most known ones, like RedHat, Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake and some others. But it’s impossible to support all distirbutions, especially custom or source-based ones, say LFS or Gentoo.

Don’t get this wrong, you can by all means install and run Gentoo on VMWare, since most of the hardware VMWare emulates is known to Linux, like LSI Logic SCSI interface, or AMD’s PCNet32 network interface. Only when it comes to graphics, VMWare uses its own device and doesn’t emulate any known one, that’s why you need to install VMWare tools before running X, otherwise, you’ll just end up with crappy colors and resolutions.

On Gentoo, the installation was fairly easy, I only had to look around the VMWare Tools package a little and figured it out. Here’s what you have to do:

• In VMWare, click on VM -> Install VMWare Tools…
• mount /mnt/cdrom
• Extract /mnt/cdrom/vmware-linux-tools.tar.gz somewhere.
• cp /path/to/vmware-tools-distrib/lib/configurator/XFree86-4/4.3.x/vmware_drv.o\
   /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/
• Now use /path/to/vmware-tools-distrib/lib/configurator/XF86Config-4 as a reference to setup your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. The only two things that really matter are the “Monitor” section XF86Config-4, and that you make sure you’re using vmware as a drive in the “Device” section. Tip: Xorg -configure might do a decent job in figuring out most of the details, it only leaves the monitor undetected, so just copy it from the sample configuration.
• startx, and everything should work fine.

I’m still not sure about the rest of VMWare tools, haven’t compiled them yet, but I’ll try working on them later on, maybe even end up with an ebuild. Personally, I only needed to get X.org to run at a 1600×1200 resolution, I don’t need the rest of the tools much, but then again, why not get the rest?