HOWTO: Get Puppy 2.10 running (off the HDD) on VMWare Server

[Braden]

This applies both to Puppy on VMWare in general, which is pretty straightforward, and to getting it installed to the hard drive, which is trickier with a fake drive. It will not initially appear in MUT, and won't be recognized by the Universal Installer.

CREATING THE VM:
- Create a new Custom VM, selecting Linux architecture and Other Linux 2.6.x kernel.
- When asked about SCSI vs. IDE hard drives, choose IDE.
- Allocate the drive (1G is lots). Make sure that VMWare allocates the space ahead of time, rather than sharing off another partition.
- Make sure the CD drive and hard drive are ready to go.
- Start the VM

Puppy should boot fine from a LiveCD. I haven't gotten Xorg to work on VMWare, but I also haven't tried extensively. Xvesa works just fine.
I seem to have a weird knack for looking up just in time to see "VMWare IDE Hard Drive" flicker past in the startup messages. I take it as a good sign.

Once Puppy is done booting, open GParted partition manager (Control Panel submenu).
It should be able to see the partition created for you by VMWare. It will be marked as unformatted. This isn't very interesting, so select it in the list, and go to the Partition menu. Format it for ext2.
Now you should be able to see the drive in the Puppy Universal Installer, and in MUT. Select "IDE (ATA) internal hard drive" in the Universal installer, and it should work fine.

Note that other changes will not stick the first time! You seem to need to boot from the hard drive first. I suppose that makes sense.
So don't bother setting up your network and all that in the first pass. Wait until you boot it from the HDD with GRUB.

Hope this helps anyone trying to get Puppy going under VMWare.

[DLWood]

Thanks Braden, I used your tips to get it working in VMWare. Everything went really easy until I went to install the GRUB loader on the virtual HD. I tried several things, but it seems like going back and formatting HDA as ext3 worked. But I changed several things so I'm not sure what made it work. I also didn't use the "simple" GRUB install, but the advanced, and selected the "MBR" (I think) option.

Xvesa seems to look a lot better on the VM than it does using the live CD. It fills out the screen perfectly and the image quality is about as good as Xorg is using the live CD too. Have you been successful with Xorg yet? Perhaps it requires installation of the VMware Tools to get Xorg working.

Have you tried to install the VMware Tools yet? I have a Ubuntu Linux VM and now a Puppy Linux VM, and it took me a while to install the Tools with Ubuntu. I was wondering if anyone had already done it with Puppy????

Another generic issue with VMware VMs......Have you figured out how to make the mouse wheel make scrolling up and down faster?? It's VERY slow with both of my VMs, and don't know how to speed it up.

Thanks again Braden; it's nice to have a Puppy VM.

[Ganymedes]

I tried to install Puppy 2.11 on VMware but failed to do that. I did not know about these instructions at that time and I got stuck with installing GRUB (like explained above) - so it would not boot. I can see two differences in my trial: a) Perhaps my Linux selection was not the same - I am not so sure if that matters (I had just "other Linux"), b) And I did not "preallocate" diskspace in VMware - I never do that in Windows, since the computers that I run are between 10-30 Gbytes and that would require a LOT of disks.

I guess that preallocation of disk space is really needed then ? In this case it does not matter cost-wise (or otherwise).

[Melpheos]

thanks a lot for the tip, i got it installed in no time on vmware workstation (same tutorial as vmware erver)

in fact, i think that is the only page that explains how to install puppy on the HDD directely under vmware