VMWare Tutorial – CentOS 4.7

So, you want to run linux on your PC, but you don’t want to repartition your drive, much less replace windows just yet? Well this may be the right solution for you. I do realise there are tutorials for this online, however this is what I did every step of the way, so lets follow;

This article assumes you have basic PC knowledge, and have already downloaded and installed VMWare or already purchased it. And you have some common sense on when to click “next”.

Please refer to http://www.vmware.com for a copy of VMWare, and http://www.centos.org/ for a copy of CentOS. For the exact copy look at: http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/4.7/isos/i386/ in particular the server iso.

Firsr things first, lets fire up VMWare. Once that’s done click on “New Virtual Machine” or simply press CTRL+N.

Next, a window will come up, click next and then Make sure the following options are checked, under Virtual Machine Configuration, “Typical”, and click next.

After that it will prompt you to select a “Guest operating system”, choose “Linux”, and under Version, select “Other Linux 2.6.x kernel”.

Here you get to name your virtual machine (this is changeable later on should you name it something you don’t like for now), under Virtual Machine name, pick something fancy or you can go along with “Salomon’s Tutorial”, if you wish to change the location for disk space reasons, you have DeepFreeze installed, or whatever reason it may be, click on Browse, and move it to a more desiarable location.

Network type, I assume you’d want your virtual machine to have some sort of network access, if you are using a home network 99% of the time, I would suggest leaving it under “Use bridged networking”.

Step 6 in our tutorial is where you get to pick how much space you want your virtual machine to have, here the sky is the limit as long as you have the disk space, I usually set it somewhere between 4.0 and 8.0 GB (gigabytes), that is enough 99% of the time for a sandbox that you want to play with.

A window showing “Virtual Machine created successfully” will come up, go ahead and click close on it.

Under the left sidebar make sure you have selected your virtual machine, chances are if you are following this tutorial you will only have one. Once having done so, under devices, double click CD-ROM. A window will pop up, look for USO ISO image, and browse, and find the CD Image of CentOS that you downloaded, once you have found it click ok.

Next step, since you probably want your Virtual Machine to have enough resources to play with everything, I usually set mine to have 512 MB or ram, instead of just 256, don’t get me wrong 256 will get you by, however, if you have the available resources put it to use. (Personally I have 3.25 GB of RAM windows is reading, and half the time I never exceed 1.5 GB of usage, why not put another 512+ MB to good use?).

Once you have all that set, you should have something that looks like the picture below under your devices. Go ahead and click “start this virtual machine”.

You may or may not get a window that comes up prompting you that you have no floppy drive set up, if it so happens to come up, go ahead and click on “no”.

Once it boots up you will see the CentOS logo with some of the install options, just press “enter”.

Next its going to prompt you that it found the CD and ask if you would like to test the CD media before the installation process, it never hurts to test it, however, we are going to skip that step today.

In the next part of the installer you get to pick the language to use during the install process, I have selected english, obviously if english isnt your first language or your forte, feel free to select a different one accordingly.

Now you get to choose the appropriate keyboard for the system, 99% of the time, it will find the right one, however its always good to double check, in my case I’m using a US English one.

Since this article is meant to be basic, we are going to let CentOS Automatically partition the drive. Don’t panic, windows is not going to disappear! Theres a reason they call these virtual machines. Go ahead and click next. You will get a window prompting you that the partition table is unreadable… would you like to initialize this drive, erasing ALL DATA? Click yes.

In this step make sure “Remove all partitions on this system” is checked and click next.

At the next step click yes.

Step 21, go ahead and click next again.

Network configuration, 99% of the time, if your at a home network, you will not need to change this as most routers have DHCP and can assign you an IP automatically, however should you be aware of something different, or you want to assign it an IP address you can do that here. Once done, click next.

Step 23 is rather important, here you will want to enable the firewall, check “Remote Login (SSH)” checked, and leave SELinux active. Basically what this does, is it enables you to use putty or a similar program to log into your box and administer it, when you have a server at a datacenter you will have to use putty, or a similar program. Once done, click next.

Here you get to set the default langauge for the system.

Step 25 is where you get to set the time for your virtual machine. I choose America/Los_Angeles because it’s the one closest to me. Once you have found the one that best suits you, click next.

Root password, I can emphisize how important it is that people use secure passwords. I know you may not have the best memory, but try to remember at least 2-3 different 10 character passwords with letters and numbers. Look here http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/ for password generation. Once you have entered a password click next. DO NOT forget your password.

Step 27, custom packages and other software, for the scope of this tutorial I will leave this one alone. We will go with the default for now, don’t panic though, its pretty easy should you need compilers. This is another one where your just going to click next.

Again another screen where you will click next, basically this one is telling you where the install log is at should you wish to review it after the installation.

Now for the fun part, on my pc it took just under 5 minutes to install from the ISO.

After your done it will prompt you to reboot, go ahead and click “reboot”.

Once it boots up yo u have successfully installed CentOS.

Should you have any questions, notice that I omited something, please post a comment and I will do my best to assist you.