Maemotalk

Gentoo on VMWare Player

February 21, 2006 on 9:00 pm | In gentoo, vm, winxp | 3 Comments

for whatever reason, i am partial to Gentoo linux, and really don’t like any distro based on RPMs. Slackware, BSD and debian have my respect, but I still am more comfortable with Gentoo. So – no apologies.

I am stuck with a corporate WinXP system and have been using coLinux for about a year or so as my virtual machine on my desktop. It is functional – as long as you do everything on the command line.

Recently I decided to see what the VMWare player had to offer in the GUI arena for virtual machines, for two basic reasons. If i was going to be doing lots of maemo porting, i would rather have a Linux GUI. Secondly i tried upgrading to the 0.6.3 coLinux version (first new release in nearly a year) and it broke my existing installation (locks on boot), so i had to backrev my install and it works fine. But i decided it was time to look at VMWare again.

VMWare does not have any Gentoo images, and does not link to any Gentoo images on their community site. So i Googled for it and found this link. The process outlined worked perfectly.

The command to creating the image file is ‘qemu-img create -f vmdk filename.vmdk size’. That is the only purpose for installing qemu.
To make it easier, I have packaged up the vmx and (empty) vmdk files described in this writeup into a tar.bz2 file. These two files, the VMWare player and the Gentoo install disk ISO will be all you need to install Gentoo to an image file. Edit the vmx file for your install, boot into the Gentoo install disk (through the VMWare player) and follow the process in the Gentoo Handbook.

Be warned the vmdk file will grow to at least 4 GB (and probably more) by the time you get a GUI loaded.
good luck

ubergEEK

PS – Like everything else on this blog, use at your own risk. Just because it worked for me, does not mean i assume responsibility for anything you do.