Installing VMware on Gentoo
As a valid alternative to Xen, I recommend VMware Workstation. You just need to install the program, change some configuration settings, and voilą, you'll have Windows or (almost) any other OS running in Linux. Nothing to be done to the Linux-kernel nor to external setup files, and you have a nice GUI which will help you configuring your virtual machine.
- Download and install the package:
emerge vmware-workstation - Run the main config script and answer to its questions:
/opt/vmware/workstation/bin/vmware-config.pl
- Create somewhere a directory where you'll host the file of the operating system which will run under VMware.
- Now you can start the main program...
/opt/vmware/workstation/bin/vmware
From here onwards the system will install your new OS as usual and after that, you'll boot it as usual. Very simple.
Remember that after rebooting the host PC, you'll have to...
/etc/init.d/vmware start
/etc/init.d/hald start
/etc/init.d/dbus start
...if you didn't insert them previously in one of your runlevels. If you don't, you could get an error message similar to this one:
/opt/vmware/workstation/lib/bin/vmware: /opt/vmware/workstation/lib/lib/libpng12 .so.0/libpng12.so.0: no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2) process 28825: Attempt to remove filter function 0xb6b36cb0 user data 0x8800d80 , but no such filter has been added D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace /opt/vmware/workstation/lib/bin/vmware: /opt/vmware/workstation/lib/lib/libpng12 .so.0/libpng12.so.0: no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2) /opt/vmware/workstation/lib/bin/vmware: /opt/vmware/workstation/lib/lib/libpng12 .so.0/libpng12.so.0: no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2) process 28837: Attempt to remove filter function 0xb6ef5cb0 user data 0x8802710, but no such filter has been added D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace localhost / # /opt/vmware/workstation/bin/vmware
Recommendation: after that you installed the OS and everything looks fine, choose in the menu "VM => Install VMware tools". This will greatly increase mouse and graphics speed.
Performance is not as good as under Xen, but still probably better than under any other emulator, if you think that actually you're running the whole OS. On my notebook (Centrino Pentium-M 2.0Ghz) I get a CPU usage of ~40 (with the CPU clock hardcoded at 2.0Ghz) when watching TV using Zattoo. This is a little bit a problem because with that clock the fan starts being noisy and if I lower the CPU clock to 1.6Ghz, which should still be more than enough, the image and sound start to get hickups. I'll check in the future if this can be tweaked.
