VMW e.x.p on Fedora 16
Well, after getting dual boot to work with WIN8CP and Fedora 16, I decided to move to F16 as more of a permanent OS. I've spent the last few nights until about 4 or 5 am working on some of these things. So please excuse my poor thought process, havn't had too much sleep lately.
Reminder this is for VMware Workstation 8 Tech Preview NOT 8.0.2
Step 1:
Get hardware raid permanently mounted in /etc/fstab ... pretty easy, figure out what the name of the raid array is by going into the disk utilities app and add it to /etc/fstab with the normal defaults 0 0 settings.
Step 2:
Download and install nVidia Video drivers:
This took a few more steps. Right away the nvidia drivers setup requires you to kill your x server. Easy step, type 'init 3' and re run the setup. Next thing it asked me to do was disable the Nouveau driver, ran a quick google search on disabling Nouveau drivers in Fedora 16, instructions worked perfectly, rebooted, setup the 2nd monitor. Next step.
Step 3:
Download and install VMware Workstation 8 Tech Preview.
I ran into a few issues right away with the installation, not having the correct packages installed was the biggest issue. I ended up adding the development repo's for the new fedora 3.3.1.5 kernel and installing the necessary packages with it; then run a yum update, and reboot. After the reboot I was still getting errors that seem to progress along with the version of 8.0.2, I ended up having to install 8.0.2 first, run the patch for 8.0.2 thats available in the forums on the vmware site, and then upgrade 8.0.2 to e.x.p since the patch does not work for e.x.p. Note: I had to upgrade to e.x.p because of the hardware version and version of vmware tools that are installed on my vms. They would not boot unless I powered them on in my windows OS, downgraded the hardware level and vmware tools, and then tried to power them on in Fedora. The next issue I came across was, the 'Enter License Key" function in the GUI would not work, just click and nothing. After find this thread (http://communities.vmware.com/message/2029214#2029214) on the community site, a little light bulb went off in my head about the license file. So I tried to edit the license file with the S# of the e.x.p version and restart the vmware service. No luck. After a few hours of doing more google searching and trying different possibilities. In that folder you will find 3 different types of licenses, ws, ws.vl, ws.eval; which I can only assume are the different types of licenses available for purchase. After running a 'cat license-ws-90-e*-201202' I noticed that the license type for each file was different. Since e.x.p is available free to the general public, the Serial Number for the license can be found on the website where you can download VMW-TP, I assumed that it was a full version of the product. There are also 2 different versions of license files in that folder, what looks to be the version for 8.0.2, and the version for e.x.p. I copied the license-ws-90-e1-201202 file to the /etc/vmware/ directory, since that correlates to the type of license I needed. Then after running another cat on the original license file, I merely just edited the new license file with "Serial = 'XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX'", saved and restarted the VMware service. Tada!! You should now be able to start the VM, but may have a new issue, an error about the Kernel version being different then what is found. I simply rebooted the machine, and re-ran VMW, and it started to work.
Step 4: Get my sound/keyboard/mouse drivers installed
TBD
Hope this helps!
