Oracle Linux & VMWare Tools
Wow, I’ve been busy since OOW2011. This is the first post since I left for San Francisco. My Android phone got blown out by a forced upgrade and would only charge when actively connected across the USB to the computer. At the conference, my laptop was sidelined as a charger.
Anyway, I’m back working on virtual environments again. I found a couple slight variation installing VMWare Tools on Oracle Unbreakable Linux. Here are the post installation steps that I encountered, and the IP addresses are based on how VMWare configured DHCP, which is qualified in this older post.
- 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 Oracle Unbreakable Linux virtual machine and it launches the following dialog box:
- Open a terminal session by right clicking anywhere in the desktop, and then choose Open in Terminal from the context menu. 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 |
You should most likely encounter an error like the following, which it appears you can ignore. If I find anything to the contrary, the post will be updated with findings.
(EE) Failed to load module "vmwgfx" (module does not exist, 0) (EE) vmware: Please ignore the above warnings about not being able to load module/driver vmwgfx (EE) open /dev/fb0: No such device |
- 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 aroot
shell by doing:
su - root |
Enter your user’s password:
Password: |
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.