OS Installation on VMWare 5.0.0: Notes

I started working with the vmware and found it to be quite cool. As the first steps I installed Solaris 10 and SUSE Enterprise Linux 9. The basic issues that I faced were

• Solaris 10 - All the CDs have to be installed after first reboot or else the system may end up in a weird state. For example I installed the first CD and then allowed it to reboot with the first CD in the drive, in that case it did not ask for any other CD and I was able to login through console since X11 was not installed. Then I tried installing the CDs 2&3 using the installer present in the root directory of the CD at which point everything was installed. After this I rebooted the server and started the X11 but I started having problem with creating directories in /home and could not load the CD (it failed with error that "device is already mounted or is busy"). After that I completely reinstalled the OS and made sure that I changed the CD after the first CD is installed and then changed the other CDs to make sure all the CDs are installed before going through another re-boot. This seems to have done the trick and server came up fine with no major issue. The basic issue that I am facing is that the server does not have the hostname (because by default it expect it to be provided by DHCP) assigned to it even after assigning it in hostname.pc0 (the interface is named pc0). Need to look more at that!! Some links
  • Basics
  • Some pointers
  • SUSE Enterprise Linux 9 The basic issue that I ran into was that the during installation the VMWare's "Graphic card" was not detected properly and the installation ran in text mode. The strange thing about the text is that it diplayed four separate screens two of which were updated but that made reading the screen very difficult.

Will keep adding stuff as I run into other issues.