Difficulty getting started with Fusion

[smontanaro]

I downloaded the trial version of VMWare Fusion today with the intention of running Solaris as a guest OS. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out which of the bazillion versions of Solaris packages to download. When I picked one more-or-less at random it took me to Sun's website where Sun was interested in me telling them what kind of hardware I wanted to buy. I don't want to buy Sun hardware. I have tons of it at work already, desktops, servers the whole enchilada. I just want to run Solaris (Open Solaris,Solaris 10, doesn't much matter) on my Mac so I can work on software in a more-or-less normal/native environment from my laptop.

So, nix Solaris for the time being. Let's try something a bit more popular. I downloaded an Ubuntu package, ubuntu710desktop.vmwarevm.7z. Figure out what the 7z extension was and installed p7zip for MacPorts, which gave me a 7za tool to unpack the download. That left me with this directory structure:

% ls -lR ubuntu710desktop.vmwarevm
total 2657416
-rw----- 1 skip staff 681 Oct 18 16:11 info.txt
-rw--- 1 skip staff 2721185792 Oct 18 13:13 ubuntu710desktop.vmdk
-rw----- 1 skip staff 1499 Oct 18 13:13 ubuntu710desktop.vmx

From VMWare Fusion I clicked the "New" button and worked my way through the setup assistant panes to the Finish pane. I selected the "Using operating system installation disk image file" radio button and then "Other" from the popup menu. I then navigated my way to the directory containing the ubuntu710desktop.vmwarevm directory, but it was insensitive, so I couldn't select it.

Now I'm stuck. Where have I gone off into the weeds?

Thanks,

Skip Montanaro

[BP9906]

Well as for Ubuntu, you're going about it with a different approach. If you're installing Ubuntu from scratch, you'll need to download a .ISO file (CD/DVD image) to attach to a New VM that you create when going through the NEW VM wizard in Fusion. Thats one way...

Another way is to use that downloaded file, ubuntu710desktop.vmwarevm. That is a folder but Leopard recognizes it as a Fusion VM that's already configured. Simply double click on the vmwarevm and Fusion will open and boot using those files you downloaded.

So you know a VM contains 2 parts: 1) Config 2) Virtual disk. Config = .vmx and Virtual DIsk = .VMDK

The VMX points to the VMDK to boot, just like a PC's BIOS points to a drive to boot an OS.

Hope this helps you understand how Fusion works and clarifies how it works.

[smontanaro]

Thanks, that helps a bunch. I had an Ubuntu 6.10 disk laying about, so I chose that option and am installing right now. I also found a distro based on the Open Solaris kernel (Nexenta). I'll try that next. It's good to know the other thing I downloaded is another option. I'll give that a try as well now that I know how to use it.

Skip

[scottishwildcat]

The two versions of Solaris you should probably be most interested in are:

Solaris 10-- the latest stable release, media downloadable from <http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp#download>. Free account signup required.

Solaris Express Developer Edition (aka SXDE)-- experimental release, based on the OpenSolaris source code, on which the next version of Solaris will be based. You can download this as a VMware appliance, or just download the media and install yourself, from <http://developers.sun.com/sxde/download.jsp>.

Note: the VMware tools are not guaranteed to work with SXDE, or any other distro based on OpenSolaris. They work fine with Solaris 10.

You might also be interested in the preview release of Project Indiana, a binary distro of OpenSolaris which supports a new packaging system that supports more Linux-like dependency resolution, installation from online repositories etc. The current version requires a little tweaking to get functional networking, though. <http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/>