VMware on Debian Etch 4.0

Written by jeroen
Apr 30, 2007 at 07:07 PM
I like playing around with different distributions. As soon as a new version of gentoo, suse, ubuntu, sabayon or fedora appears I want to try it out. What I'm getting tired of is having to reinstall my system again and again, which has to be done if using beta versions or other cutting edge software (like beryl) which trashes my system. Besides all this I hate dual boot so this is not an option for me. For this reason I wanted to try some virtualisation software to overcome this problem. The one I picked was VMware, for no apparent reason. I went to the site and downloaded the VMware server package. I followed the installation instructions from Falko Timme's howto and fired away.
After the installation I started the VMware Sever Console and it worked instantly, I created a new virtual machine and downloaded the Gentoo 2006.1 image. This was the opportunity for me to give Gentoo a try again. I abandoned the Gentoo distro about 3 years ago since the compilation of the system takes to much time. Besides that I'm (and especially was) learning Linux so it happened often that I had to reinstall the system after I done something I couldn't repair.
Within VMware you can chose an iso image as virtual cd drive, so I did and started the virtual machine. From this moment on only good things happened, I could directly boot from the iso image. I got into the installation and all I had to do was follow the normal Gentoo handbook. All went fine until I was ready for the first reboot. I got an error telling me that /dev/sda3 was not the root location or that this location couldn't be found. Lucky for me it was an easy solution, all I had to do was add the word doscsi in the grub.conf file at the end of the kernel line. Now all worked, even the network was detected. The network works via my Debian WLAN connection, bridged via VMware. All very cool. This gives me the opportunity to test every Linux distro without having the pain of reinstalling my main system time and time again.
Maybe I'm a bit late, with this VM hype which is going on but I have to say that VMware server is a very nice and painless program, I would recommend it to everyone.