Configure Fedora on VMWare
It seems Fedora is always a bit of work. You begin by mistakenly downloading Fedora Live, which isn’t really the product but a run-time demonstration product. After finding the product, if you choose a full installation, there are post installation steps to complete. The first time you launch it in VMWare, you’ll see a Gnome 3 Failed to Load error dialog like this:
I suspected that installing VMWare Tools would fix that, and it did. However, your entry account doesn’t have “sudoers” permissions. You must add them before you can run VMWare Tools. There are six steps to enable your user with the sudoers permissions and four others to configure the standard installation:
- Navigate to the Applications menu choice in the upper left hand corner. You’ll get the following drop-down menu. Click on Other menu item to launch a dependent floating menu.
- The following floating menu displays to the right. Click on Users and Groups menu item at the bottom of the list.
- The choice from the floating menu prompts account validation. Enter your password and click the OK button.
- After validating your password, the User Manager dialog opens. Click on the single user that should be installed –
mclaughlinm. Click the Properties button to change the groups assigned to the user.
- The User Properties dialog opens with the default User Data tab clicked. Click on the Groups tab to add the user to the
wheelgroup as a property of your user.
- Scroll down through the list of groups and click the
wheelgroup check box. Like the Mac OS, the wheel group provides “sudoer” privileges. Click the OK button to assign the group to the user.
- Navigate to the VMWare Menu, choose Virtual Machine and in the drop down menu Install VMWare Tools. This will mount a virtual CD in the Fedora virtual machine.
- Navigate to the Places menu choice and then Computer. Inside the Computer, choose the VMware Tools from the Devices section and you’ll see the following:
- Open a terminal session by choosing Applications, within the drop down choose System Tools, and then launch a Terminal session. You can then run the VMWare Toolkit by following these instructions:
cd /media/VMware\ Tools cp VMwareTools-8.4.7-416484.tar.gz /tmp cd /tmp gunzip VMwareTools-8.4.7-416484.tar.gz tar -xvf VMwareTools-8.4.7-416484.tar cd vmware-tools-distrib sudo ./vmware-install.pl |
The last step requires that you reply to a set of prompts. If you’d like to accept the default at one time, you can use the following command:
sudo ./vmware-install.pl --default |
If you find limited access to the system after installing or upgrading VMWare Tools, you may have packages in the caught between start and finish. You can clean them up with the following syntax, as the root user:
sudo yum-complete-transaction |
- In the terminal session you should configure three files to make sure your networking works. I found that the dialogs failed to set one key element, so it’s simply easier to do this manually. Rather than using
sudo, you should open arootshell with the following command:
sudo sh |
Enter your user’s password:
[sudo] password for mclaughlinm: |
You should use vi to edit and save the resolv.conf file with appropriate domain, search, and nameserver values. The values below work for VMWare when the gateway IP address is 172.16.123.2.
# Generated by NetworkManager
domain localdomain
search localdomain
nameserver 172.16.123.2 |
Using vi, edit the /etc/sysconfig/network file to include an appropriate gateway IP address, like so:
NETWORKING=yes HOSTNAME=localhost.localdomain GATEWAY=172.16.123.2 |
The last file to fix is /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file. This is the file that isn’t completely configured by the GUI component (it fails set the ONBOOT value to yes).
DEVICE=eth0 HWADDR=00:0c:29:31:ef:46 ONBOOT=yes NM_CONTROLLED=yes BOOTPROTO=dhcp TYPE=Ethernet DNS1=172.16.123.2 USERCTL=no PEERDNS=yes IPV6INIT=no |
You reset networking with the following command:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart |
As always, I hope this helps a few folks.
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