Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has setup the following before:

Installed Red Hat as the OS on a PC (as thin and clean an install as possible) which then loads VMPlayer, which in turn loads an XP image.

I want to make is appear that the PC only has XP on it to the user, despite the fact it is a virtual image. The only log in should be the standard windows log in, so also trying to bypass Red Hat login GUI.

Is this possible??

Are you referring to local login when the machine having Redhat and VMware boots or remote ?

If local then, Redhat the host Operating System needs to start before Windows XP the guest Operating System can start/boot. As far as remote access is concerned, you can always port forward Remote Desktop port to the local IP address of the XP guest instance and access it using Remote Desktop.

You could maybe plugin monitor to graphics card No2 and make only VMWare show on that monitor when it is started? Regular output would not be visible unless you plug in another monitor to main VGA output.

Essentially what I want is for the start up script to load VM Player rather than Gnome (or at least on top of it, without Gnome ever being visable).

Anybody have an idea how to achieve this?

Also, anybody got any resources which allow you to configure Red Hat to boot up as fast as possible? Running the bare mimimum processes required. The OS will only have to network and host VM Player

You can set "init 3" (id:3:initdefault or init 1 in /etc/inittab file instead of "id:5:initdefault:" to avoid runnig gui. Then you can set Linux to automaticaly login and VMWare to run that windows machine. It's called "headless" mod.

As for the unwanted services, you should research waht each service is doing, and change with chkconfig to disable all unnecessary services.

Hi DrLove73,

Are you able to elaborate on 'Headless Mode' for me a little? Or even just point me in the direction of some useful resources for it?

Many thanks

Headless should be read as "no GUI" mode. I've read that Sun's VirtualBox (GPL) can be started/run from command prompt, or in the background, and connect to it via VNC (from remote PC for sure, but maybe you can even connect from same PC). I suppose that VMWare has same options.

Your demand is very unorthodox, and it is a real question it that can be done. If you would not require that Linux is not visible at all, you could run guest OS by adding appropriate command to Gnome Session (System -> Preferences -> More Preferences -> Sessions) and it would run as soon as Gnome is up, in full screen without user interaction.

Thanks for your reply DrLove73, I am going to see if I can come up with a solution which avoids the need to launch Gnome at all. I believe it is possible, I'm just not sure how to do it!

You should also taka a look at KVM project and VirtualBox. I use both on the daily basis (I have rpm's for KVM version 85 not 36 shipped with RHEL 5.x). Maybe some of them can run without GNOME (Xorg will have to be running I guess) if VMWare can not.