Installing vmware tools on Red Hat Linux 7.2

[pmporter]

I am running Workstation 8 and I am having some problems getting the VMware tools to install.

The issue occurs when running vmware-config-tools.pl. It cannot find the gcc binary. I supply it with the path of /usr/bin but it returns an error stating that is is not a valid path.

A similar issue occurs with the path to the kernel header. I suppied the path /lib/modules/2.4.7-10 but I received an error stating that this was not the correct path.

My skills with linux are newbient so I could very well be doing something ignorant.

Thanks,

-Pierre

[Jackobli]

Hello Pierre and welcome to the VMware Community forum for VMware Workstation.

Red Hat Linux 7.2 is a quite old Distribution. Do you really need this version?

Any chance to talk you into CentOS, which is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone and fully binary compatible?

VMware products are usually supporting RHEL and CentOS straightforward and there is no need to install kernel-sources, libraries and compilers to install the Tools.

[pmporter]

The selection of Red Hat 7.2 is more based on the fact that I have bunch of old books and CD's dealing with learning RH 7.2 and I was looking to restart learing Linux with what I had on hand. I am quite willing to abandon RH 7.2 and learn on a different distribution. My ultimate goal is to 1) learn Linux 2) get familiar and comfortable with putting together LAMP based systems.

Any recommendations?

Thanks,

-Pierre

[Jackobli]

pmporter wrote:

My ultimate goal is to 1) learn Linux 2) get familiar and comfortable with putting together LAMP based systems.

Any recommendations?

catch-22 😉

There are several recommandations.

The purist will try to talk you into Debian, the "most" free (GPL) Linux.

The german speaking guy will try to talk you into OpenSuSE as it has a long history of native translations.

The french guy (Pierre?) will recommend Mandriva as it has french roots.

The cosmopolitan will vote for Ubuntu (indeed, at least partly Debian based) as it is derived from an african humanist philosophy.

The compatibility guy will SHOUT out loud for CentOS, which is 100% binary compatible with Redhat Enterprise Linux.

The chinese or japanese guy will probably vote for Asianux.

The guy who is living at the edge will strongly favor Fedora because it tries to integrate always the newest things.

and there are still many other distributions.

IMHO (as a guy who actually is abandoning OpenSuSE after several years of use because of way to many bugs in newest versions) CentOS has a very good support from VMware (Tools) and it's support (updates) are on a very long term basis. You will find many support pages on the internet about it. Many people are using CentOS for LAMP.

Ubuntu is also a good choice as it comes also as a Long Term Support-Edition (LTS), latest is 10.04 (April 2010), next will come as 12.04 (actually as Beta). Ubuntu also does regular (short term support) editions.

Both CentOS and Ubuntu may be installed as a GUI-less (without X-Window) server edition or Desktop edition with the full comfort.

[pmporter]

Yeah....that's what I'm finding out. There are 60 billion (okay 59 Billion) distros out there and everyone thinks theirs is best.

I will defintely look into CentOS. I think it's the only distribution that I haven't run across!

Despite my name, I'm a citizen of the USA.....

-Pierre

[Jackobli · Accepted solution]

pmporter wrote:

I will defintely look into CentOS. I think it's the only distribution that I haven't run across!

Despite my name, I'm a citizen of the USA.....

Yeah, I expected that, was just kidding 🙂

Could be quite difficult to spell for the average, like mine, Urs.

For future LAMP I will also choose CentOS.

I like Ubuntu for its extremely fast boot and minimal overhead. The server OS for virtual machines is very small.

But better chose one to learn because the differences are sometimes annoying.

[keiooz]

Why not upgrading to Red Hat Linux 9 since for all I know is the latest version. That will surely work.

[Bernd_Nowak]

If you choose Centos I would choose version 6.2 because it's the actual one and is more or less identical to the latest Red Hat Enterprise Release.

Google or use any other search engine for LAMP installation on Centos 6.x

Redhat 9 is a bad idea if you want to invest time in learning how to setup Linux as it's much to old in my view.

My own favorite is Ubuntu LTS (desktop or server) as in contrary to Redhat (CentOS) I believe the community help is much wider as there are several articles which are only published on the RHEL knowledge base and you can only access them when you have registered there.

And as a side effect because Ubuntu is Debian based you get some knowledge for Debian too. Some internet companies still does all on Debian systems.

But hey, all IMO

[pmporter]

Hi Urs!

Well I loaded up CentOS 6.2. It was cake compared to arm wrestling with RH 7.2. VMware went automatically to the Easy Install mode (or whatever it's called) and did all the work. I left the room for about ten minutes or so and when I came back it was loaded. Then I thought, "Wait a minute, what about the root account?". It seems that it in my absence, a root account was created without the benefit of me specifying a password. I suppose I could have re-installed, but I found a method to change the password, so I'm good to go.

My only question would be: in my absence from the install, did add miss the opportunity to provide any other option besides the root password?

Thanks for suggesting CentOS.

-Pierre

[Bernd_Nowak]

I'm not urs but I would use "I will install OS later" instead of easy install so that you have more choice what get's installed. Just make sure that you connect the ISO to your CD/DVD device as well as the checkbox is ticked "Connect at power on" so that the ISO will load during boot.

IMO

[Jackobli]

Pierre, I agree with Bernd.

The "Easy Install" usually asks some - os depending - questions. If it detects windows, it asks for the serial number, the name of the owner (to set "licensed to name") and the password for the Administrator account. On Linux it should ask for the root password and an unprivileged user account and its password.

But these are not mandatory, perhaps you were to fast on hitting enter 🙂

The manual process, as mentioned by Bernd, allows you to use the standard setup of CentOS. Thus, you may choose your hostname/domain, your partition layout, your keyboard layout, your timezone and of course it let's you choose the packages to install.

If on Autoinst, you may change (most of) those options later. The partition layout may be more difficult to change after installaiton.

[pmporter]

Hi again,

Thanks for the advice. Since I am just in learning mode right now, Easy Install is probably not an issue, but when I get into more advanced implementations, I will turn off the Easy Install feature in order to get a more customized configuration. Meanwhile, everything is going great with CentOS!

Thanks,

-Pierre