Fedora on VMware Player Part 2

The important thing about installing a multi-disc distro with VMware Player is that it will create a lock on the disc so that it will tell you to change discs, yet when you do, it says the same disc is still in there. The way to counter this is to hit the CD-ROM button at the top of the VMware player window. This toggle button controls whether the CD is mounted or not. The first time you will get some warnings, but by clicking cancel you can tell it to ignore the lock the emulator has on the drive. From then on, changing discs during installation is as simple as toggling the button off and on, to let it know a new CD is in.

Overall, the installation has taken about an hour. It may have gone faster if I had given the virtual machine more RAM, but by the time I thought of that, I didn’t want to have to restart the installation. Having used QEMU with DSL, which was extremely slow and non-responsive, I find this to be an adequate solution so far. Given, I haven’t tried anything crazy like trying to play a movie or song, but so far it seems to be just as good as a dual boot without all the crap. On cool thing you can do with the VMware player that you can’t do with dual booting is suspend the sucker. As long as you have as much disc space on your computer as there is RAM allocated to the virtual machine, you can save the state of the machine as opposed to logging out and shutting down completely. Then when you restart, it loads up your computer as it was. This is similar to hibernate, except that you are hibernating one OS to go to another!

Rebooted into Fedora Core 5 test 2. The GRUB image is a lighter blue color as I described was the theme before when I was trying to install it on my laptop. The boot time is comparable to my dedicated Linux machine. Strangely enough, it never prompted me for setting up a user, so I’m forced to login as root. Is this a bug in the installer or a consequence of VMware?

I’ll be exploring some more - probably this weekend, and I’ll post some screenshots.

• Fedora