Slackware on vmware.
 

Hello there, please excuse me, I really do think that this question has been up before, allthough I could not find it.

I'm trying to install Slackware 10.0 on vmware (4.5).
I have installed and used Slackware before, but not trough vmware.
How do i find and set up the virtual drive ?

I do as follows, boot the cd runs my virtual machine, it finds and opens Slackware. Usually I would set up my keyboard, and do fdisk -l to list my partitions, this does not give a result now. From there i use cfdisk to set it up, mainly becuase it saves time and is easier to use, cfdisk runs into a Fatal Error, because there are no drives.

I'm really stuck here. Any help is appreciated.

The installtion is supposed to be easier if you use Mandrake, Red Hat or Suse. But I'm really stuck to Slackware, as it's by far the best disttribution in my opinion, of thoose I've tried.

I figured it out. Thanks.

I'm having the same problem right now, how did you eventually get it to work?

check that your virtual HDD is IDE, not SCSI (default)

Ahh thanks, I recreated the virtual disk as an IDE disk and now I'm in fdisk, partitioning away!

I had to go in through the custom settings to create the disk as IDE, apparently SCSI is the default... It's just weird though, I was loading the scsi.s boot image, and /dev/sda wasn't even showing up.

Slackware installs fine with a virtual IDE hard drive. The fun part is still yet to come: getting vmtools to work. This forum should have an old thread that talks about how to get vmtools to install and work for Slackware as guest.

try adaptec.s not sure :) :( :^?

I searched and found a post about this before but couldn't find it today when trying to install Slackware 10.2 as guest to a Windows host. Finally, I found and translated a page found on the web.

To install Vmware tools 5.5.1 on Slackware 10.2:

- Select VM->Install VMWare tools
- Then, mount the cdrom in Slackware
- copy and uncompress the tar.gz file to /tmp: tar zxvf vmware-linux-tools.tar.gz
- cd /etc/rc.d
- for V in {0,1,2,3,4,5,6}; do ln -s /etc/rc.d /etc/rc.d/rc${V}.d; done
- then go to the installer dir, /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
- and ./vmware-install.pl

Now, the installer starts, I selected all the defaults and it works OK for me. I ran the config program when prompted, and it didnt' like that gcc was newer than the version used for the kernel, but I pressed on and all seems well so far.

Yep, that's the one. Pretty cool, aint it? Glad you found it. ;-)

I tried adaptec.s
 

I tried adaptec.s and it still didn't work. Seems there should be a way to get it to work with SCSI instead of IDE, since slackware does support SCSI.

Got it
 

You have to load the kernel raid.s. I guess VMWare presents the hard drive as some sort of raid.

So it is better to try and install slackware in vmware as IDE drive, is that the general belief here?

I too have not been able to get slackware to install either.

have your internet connection worked on your vmware ?

I did get Slackware 12 working in vwmare with scsi which has much better performance than the IDE drivers, with the latest version of vmware only though.

Oddly enough tho, Slack 10.2 and 11 feel faster than 12 does in vmware which makes no sense to me because on a native install Slack 12 blows 10.2 & 11 out of the water for my boxen.

As far as the networking, is concerned, no. I cannot get vmware tools to build the fast network drivers or the shared folder's so I only get the "stock" pcnet32 to work.

On a side note, I'm going to give openbox a try, it looks quite promising.

simple way to do it, on almost any vmware
 

if you have a scsi hdd, simply type cfdisk /dev/sda (you might also want to try /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, etc)