Installing SimplyMEPIS on VMware Workstation

February 21, 2009 at 11:26 pm | Posted in Technical | Leave a comment

After installing openSUSE 11.1, Debian 5.0, and OpenSolaris 2008.11 on VMware Workstation 6.5, I attempted to do the same for SimplyMEPIS 7.0.

Since I understood MEPIS was derived from Debian, I followed very much the same procedure as for Debian Lenny.

1. I downloaded SimplyMEPIS-7.0-32.iso from http://www.mepis.org/mirror.

2. I created a VMware Worstation 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

3.  The install wizard proved very simple to follow and my virtual machine was set up in a matter of minutes. I took the opportunity to take a snapshot of the VM, just in case.

4. I started the installation of the VMware Tools and realised, as I expected by then, that the linux headers were missing.

I therefore opened an xterm, and entered as root:

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

As GCC was already installed, I did not have to install it nor make.

However, I was not able to give the Tools’ installer the right path to the kernel source and typed instead:

# ln -sf /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r) /usr/src/linux

The install process went smoothly thereafter although, again as was the case for Lenny, I needed to add Option “CorePointer” in the mouse-related section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf, as follows:

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

That was it and everything worked fine, as promised on the MEPIS homepage!

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