No Znx!

So I recently showed you how easy it was to install VMware under Redhat. Now lets look at how easy it is to install Windows XP as a guest OS.

First you will need to get a hold of your Windows XP CD ready for the installation, put it into the CD-Rom.

Open up the VMware console and select File > New > Virtual Machine. This will open us the Wizard that will walk us through the installation. Click Next and then select Typical and again click Next. Select Windows XP from the list of operating systems available, you can normally leave the location as its default but remember that you need at least 8Gb (the default) per guest OS that you are installing. I normally choose a bridged network setup, with most network layouts now there is a DHCP server and its easy to add another IP to your network. You can however set it to share its IP with the host system. As you go through the next steps, selecting the defaults is normally good enough. You can tweak if you wish but I am happy to settle for the defaults. 

Once all that is complete it will make 8Gb of space available for your install. At this point you can start the guest system and it will then boot from the Windows CD. Continue as normal through the Windows install and you should wind up with a Windows XP installation.

Once it is all up and running I do highly suggest that you install VMware Tools, available by doing VM > VMware Tools. The installer should then pop up and start. You should see the VMware icon in the lower corner by the clock.

Poke around and have fun. All the other OS installs are carried out in much the same manner.

That’s it, a working XP guest installation!

Installing VMware server is really an easy process but I thought I’d doodle it here to help new users.

First you want to ensure that your kernel and kernel-dev packages match one another in version. Running these will check that out:

$ uname -r
2.6.18-92.1.10.el5
$ rpm -q kernel-devel
kernel-devel-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5

If you find that your versions do not match then you should upgrade both packages like this:

# yum -y upgrade kernel kernel-devel

After which you should reboot into the newly installed kernel.

Now you are ready to download the latest VMware Server. You should download the RPM and register for a serial number on that link. Install the RPM like this:

# rpm -ivh VMware-server-1.0.6-91891.i386.rpm

VMware requires some programs and libraries to be installed, so run this command to make sure they are there:

# yum install libXtst-devel libXrender-devel xinetd

If that is all successful then you can continue and configure VMware.

# vmware-config.pl

This script will prompt you for some questions and setup VMware for you. Once complete you can start the VMware Server Console from a link in your menus.

That’s it for now, I will detail how to setup a Windows XP install soon.