Vitra Desk

Installing Debian Lenny on VMware Workstation

After it dawned on me that many Linux distributions were based on Debian, I decided to experience it first hand. I took it as a good omen that the latest version of the OS, version 5.0 code-named Lenny, had been officially released just a few days before.

1. I downloaded debian-500-i386-kde-CD-1.iso from http://www.debian.com/CD/http-ftp/.

2. I created a VMware Workstation virtual machine with the following settings:

• OS: Linux, Other 2.6.x Linux
• RAM: 512 Mb
• Disk space: 8 Gb
• Disk type: SCSI
• Sound card: Auto detect
• USB: Auto detect
• Network adapter: NAT
• Processors: 2

and followed the instructions on my screen to install without any problem Lenny on my virtual machine.

3. Since everything (e.g., sound, internet) was working satisfactorily, I took a snapshot of the VM and endeavoured to install the VMware Tools.

VMware Workstation mounted the tools which I extracted onto my hard drive. I then ran as root

# ./vmware-install.pl

I accepted all the default settings but as was the case for openSUSE, the kernel headers were not pre-installed so I followed a similar-ish procedure to obtain them:

# apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

and ran vmware-install.pl again. I was notified I did not have a C compiler installed so I entered:

# apt-get install gcc

and

# apt-get install make

for good measure, on the basis of my previous openSUSE experience.

vmware-install.pl failed again because my newly installed version of GCC was too recent. Fortunately the older version was also installed and it was a matter of

# ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 /usr/bin/gcc

I confidently ran vmware-install.pl again and was delighted when the VMware Tools successfully installed… Or so I thought.

After restarting the X server (Crtl-Alt-Backspace), I realised my mouse was not working correctly anymore.

Although this was not related to the problem, I first reactivated the latest version of GCC:

# ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-4.3 /usr/bin/gcc

and started googling; I soon realised this was a known VMware Tools issue and I merely needed to add Option “CorePointer” in the mouse-related section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf, like so:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “VMware Mouse”
Driver “vmmouse”
Option “CorePointer”
Option “Protocol” “ps/2″
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Emulate3Buttons” “false”
Option “Emulate3Timeout” “70″
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″
Option “Buttons” “5″
EndSection

I then restarted the X server and could enjoy a perfectly integrated Lenny virtual machine.

Overall, I have to say I am rather impressed by this distro as I am getting more and more familiarised with it.