Suse and OpenSuse

[dp_fusion]

I had a very successful new install of Solaris 10 in Fusion 2.0.1 last week so thought I'd try OpenSuse again. I installed v. 11.0. The VMWare menu knew I was installing Suse but not OpenSuse. The DVD comes with VMWare support but of course the version is wrong. Regardless, it works well. Once the OS was running I selected the Install VMWare Tools menu option and nothing happened. Reboot, try again, same thing. So here's the question. Is it still possible that the consumer product Fusion 2.0.1 does not have support for the consumer version of Suse Linux? Or did something go bad with my installation?

[admin]

I'm not familiar with SuSE, but do you need to explicitly mount disks? All the menu item does is attach the appropriate Tools image, but some guests don't automount. Also check that the Linux Tools image exists in /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/isoimages/

[dp_fusion]

OpenSuse v 10.x automounted the tools, but they were not correctly written and so were impossible to install without a lot of hacking. Those tools seemed to be made for a VMWare hypervisor other than Fusion. I'll see if I can get the tool set onto the system manually. The question remains - what is the level of support for the consumer version of Suse linux (OpenSuse)?

[dp_fusion]

The VMware tools do not install properly in OpenSuse 11.0. This is unchanged from OpenSuse 10.3. The best option short of hacking the VMware tools to force them to work is to accept the VMware Tools warning as inevitable. The tools provided by Suse work adequately.

Someday you folks should get the consumer version of these Linux products running in your consumer version of VMware for Mac or just announce that you're not going to support them.

[VirtualMachinea]

I just tried openSUSE 11.1RC on my Mac mini running Fusion 2.0.1 and I'm happy to report that with a bit of fiddling, everything works and the tools install properly. The default installation actually installs automatically some of the tools, which is good and bad. The good part is that you have instant mouse-across-vm functionality. The bad news is that to do get all the tools installed, you have to uninstall the vmware tools that were already installed (I think there were four). The DVD mounting works; fixed from version 11.1b5 so you'll see the tools mounted on the desktop when you invoke the install command from the menu. But you have to install the compiling bits, which you can do by typing as root in a Terminal: "yast2 --install gcc gcc-c++ kernel-source make". (You must activate the openSUSE repositories listed by default before doing that; via the yast control panel.) Unfortunately, the tools installation still won't proceed without the removal of certain tools files that had been previously installed, but I can't remember what folder they were installed in. If you run the "./vmware-tools.pl" command from the vmware tools installation folder, the installation will start and then stop, telling you what files have to be removed. Unfortunately, the files are not in the folder mentioned by the installer. That folder doesn't exist but the "renegade" tools were in a folder in the part of the hierarchy mentioned. (Sorry, I didn't write the folder name down, but I found the folder without too much trouble.) Removing the vmware files in that folder was easy (note: there was one obviously non-vmware file in that folder, so I left it and didn't delete the folder).

Running the tools install now works, except it is unable to install the vsock module. I don't know what this does, but the same happens in other newer Linux installations and it doesn't seem to affect the functionality. You can resize the vm window on the fly, move files to and from the Mac desktop, move the cursor, share Mac folders, etc.

The only thing that doesn't work properly is the audio, but this may be specific to minis without external speakers. It is fixable; there is a thread with a fix for this here.

Edit: The other thing that I discovered is that networking doesn't remain after the state is saved. I have to restart the vm to get it back.

[VirtualMachinea]

The VMware tools do not install properly in OpenSuse 11.0. This is unchanged from OpenSuse 10.3. The best option short of hacking the VMware tools to force them to work is to accept the VMware Tools warning as inevitable. The tools provided by Suse work adequately.

For what it's worth, the freeware program, VirtualBox runs openSUSE 11.0 flawlessly on an Intel Mac. The tools install easily. I would rather run it on VMware Fusion because VirtualBox tools don't include drag and drop copying of files from host to vm, but given the glitches I've experienced with openSUSE 11 (11.1 in this case) on Fusion (with networking loss after saving state and audio requiring reconfiguration after each startup), VBox is probably the best option right now. I hope VMware will update the tools soon so that they are easier to install and work better with recent Linux kernels. But in this case, I wonder if the problems in openSUSE aren't partly due to conflicts with the vmware tools installed by default.