Red Hat Linux 7.3

Be sure to read General Installation Instructions for All VMware Products and this section before installing this operating system.

The easiest method of installing Red Hat Linux 7.3 in a virtual machine is to use the standard Red Hat distribution CD. The notes below describe an installation using the standard distribution CD; however, installing Red Hat Linux 7.3 via the boot floppy/network method is supported as well. If your VMware product supports it, you can also install from a PXE server.

Fulfill these requirements before you install Red Hat Linux 7.3:

•	Create and configure a new virtual machine.

Consider these support and configuration issues for Red Hat Linux 7.3:

•	You should not run the X server that is installed when you set up Red Hat Linux 7.3. Instead, to get an accelerated SVGA X server running inside the virtual machine, you should install the VMware Tools package immediately after installing Red Hat Linux 7.3.

•	With many Linux guest operating systems, various problems have been observed when the BusLogic virtual SCSI adapter is used with VMware virtual machines. VMware recommends that you use the LSI Logic virtual SCSI adapter with this guest operating system.

Installation Steps

1	Insert the Red Hat Linux 7.3 CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive.

2	Power on the virtual machine to start installing Red Hat Linux 7.3.

You must install Red Hat Linux 7.3 using the text mode installer, which you can choose when you first boot the installer. At the Red Hat Linux 7.3 CD boot prompt, you are offered the following choices:

To install or upgrade a system ... in graphical mode ...
To install or upgrade a system ... in text mode, type: text <ENTER>.
To enable expert mode, ...
Use the function keys listed below ...

To choose the text mode installer, type text and press Enter.

3	Follow the installation steps as you would for a physical machine. Be sure to make the choices outlined in the following steps.

4	In the Mouse Selection screen, choose Generic – 3 Button Mouse (PS/2) and select the option Emulate 3 Buttons for three-button mouse support in the virtual machine.

5	Choose the language and keyboard, and then in the Installation Type screen, choose either Server or Workstation for the installation type.

6	You might see a warning that says:

Bad partition table. The partition table on device sda is corrupted. To create new partitions, it must be initialized, causing the loss of ALL DATA on the drive.

This does not mean that anything is wrong with the hard drive on your physical computer. It simply means that the virtual hard drive in your virtual machine needs to be partitioned and formatted. Select the Initialize button and press Enter. Also note that sda appears in the message as the device name if the virtual disk in question is a SCSI disk; if the virtual disk is an IDE drive, hda appears in the message as the device name instead.

7	Allow automatic partitioning of the disk to occur in the Automatic Partitioning screen.

8	If your computer is connected to a LAN that provides DHCP support, in the Network Configuration screen, you can select the option Use bootp/dhcp. If you prefer, you can also set the networking parameters manually.

9	In the Video Card Selection screen, choose any card from the list.

10	In the Video Card Configuration screen, choose Skip X Configuration.

This completes basic installation of the Red Hat Linux 7.3 guest operating system.

VMware Tools

Be sure to install VMware Tools in your guest operating system. For an overview of VMware Tools and for a listing of the manuals that contain instructions for installing VMware Tools in your guest, see knowledge base article 340 at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/340.

Do not start the X server in the guest operating system until you install VMware Tools.