Hello, Belenix List,
I noticed that Manish had mentioned that he uses VMWare Fusion, so I
guessed that it might be possible to install Belenix 0.7.1 on Fusion
in a MacBook. And it is, and it is a great distro. Keep up the good
work! It's not too hard, if someone else wants to try it. Here are a
few notes:
1. VMWare Fusion 2.0.1 on a MacBook Pro, running OS X Server 10.5.6,
will read the 0.7.1 install .iso image. Select "Use operating system
disk image file" for the Installation Media Option, and then select
the belenix_0.7.1.iso. No need to burn an actual cd, unless you want
one handy (I would burn an actual CD for a "bare metal" install, but
not usually for a Virtual Guest). The bit torrent wasn't working for
me, but the .iso downloaded in Safari in about 40 minutes.
2. Once the CD boots in the Virtual Guest, I just clicked on the
"Install Belenix" icon on the Desktop. The plain KDE worked for a
Desktop option. The 3D and XFCE window managers on the boot CD had
some difficulty with the display in VMWare (probably a mouse driver in
XFCE, which doesn't like a laptop touch pad; no idea on the 3D).
3. I used a 24 gig SCSI hard disk, in 2 Gig chunks, WITHOUT
pre-allocating all the file space. My guess is that IDE might not
work as a Solaris boot in VM, but maybe it would; someone can let me
know.
4. I used the default options on the install, and then it rebooted
off the virtual hard disk. Then I had to fix a few things:
5. DHCP Client: NWAM did not work as advertised, but I didn't expect
it to. DHCP was running, but it did not give a DHCP client address
for the interface through Fusion. So here's what I did:
6. From the terminal:
$ ifconfig -a
This gives the output:
lo0: flags=2001000849<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4,VIRTUAL> mtu
8232 index 1
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000
e1000g0: flags=201004843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,DHCP,IPv4,CoS>
mtu 1500 index 2
inet 192.168.54.136 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.54.255
lo0 is the loopback, so we know that the interface through VMWare to
the host machines internet connection is:
e1000g0
7. Fusion is set to use NAT for the Belenix guest, so we want to have
Belenix use a DHCP client to connect. So:
$ su
[type in your root password here when asked]
# cd /etc
# touch e1000g0.dhcp
This creates the file:
/etc/e1000g0.dhcp
which tells dhcpagent to use dhcp on that interface, according to
BigAdmin, or System Admin, or whatever they call it now:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/806-0916/6ja8539a6?a=view
I have no idea if you can actually put any kind of text in the file
itself. The file just has to be in the /etc directory. Mine is
empty.
8. I had to reboot, but from that point on it worked fine. I had internet.
I don't know why NWAM doesn't just handle this. Maybe netconf does
this more easily, I don't know. This only applies if you want the
virtual interface to use DHCP.
Here are a few things I will try for this install:
1. Mount zfs pools on the Belenix guest on disks through the host
machine, and also using iSCSI mounted remote disks.
2. Set up CIFS/SMB, WebDav, NFS, and maybe a few others on the Belenix server.
3. Once that works, I will try to copy the guest to other VMWare hosts
(Workstation, maybe ESX; don't know yet).
It may not work, and it will take a while, I think, but you guys have
really done some excellent work with Belenix.
Things that still aren't working:
1. Installing vmware tools absolutely messes up the display and
keyboard in Fusion. vmware-user doesn't run at startup, and the
display and keyboard are a wreck. I had to boot into single user mode
(thank you for that option!), and run vmware-tools-uninstall.pl.
But that's not Belenix's fault, as I see it. It would be nice if
tools worked, but it's not bad without it.
So any ideas, tips? Isn't there a gui web based for smf
(smf://localhost:700? Something like that?), or svcs or svcadm? Or
does KDE do CIFS, WebDav setup from the desktop?
Also good work on the package manger and repositories. I haven't
figured it out yet (is there an emacs port?), but I'm working on it.
Many Thanks, and I hope someone finds this useful.
William
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**gwb************
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