Red Hat Linux 7.3

Support

This guest operating system is supported on the following VMware products:

General Installation Notes

Be sure to read General Guidelines for All VMware Products as well as this guide to installing your specific guest 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 may also install from a PXE server.

Before installing the operating system, be sure that you have already created and configured a new virtual machine.

Note: 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.

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 need to install Red Hat Linux 7.3 using the text mode installer, which you may 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, then in the Installation Type screen, choose either Server or Workstation for the installation type.
  6. You may 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, then in the Network Configuration screen, you may select the option Use bootp/dhcp. If you prefer, you may 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 details, see the manual for your VMware product or follow the appropriate link in the knowledge base article at www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=340.

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

Note: When you start installing VMware Tools (by typing
./vmware-install.pl in the vmware-tools-distrib directory), the following message appears:

Found an installed version of the VMware SVGA driver for XFree86 4. Some versions of this driver included with the XFree86 4 distributions do not work properly. Would you like to install a stable (but possibly older) version of the driver over the currently installed one?

If you plan to dual boot the virtual machine, answer Yes to allow the driver to be installed. Answer Yes again to back up the existing video driver files and also copy the XF86Config-4.dist file to XF86Config-4.vm. The latter file is used when dual booting the virtual machine.

If you do not intend to dual boot the virtual machine, answer No to keep the existing driver.

Enabling Sound After Installing Red Hat Linux 7.3

VMware GSX Server: The sound device is disabled by default and must be enabled with the virtual machine control panel (VM > Settings) after the operating system has been installed. To set up the virtual machine to play sound, see Configuring Sound in the GSX Server documentation.

Known Issues

Guest Screen Saver

VMware Workstation or VMware GSX Server: On a Linux host with an XFree86 3.x X server, it is best not to run a screen saver in the guest operating system. Guest screen savers that demand a lot of processing power can cause the X server on the host to freeze.

Migration to a Different Processor

VMware Workstation, VMware ACE or VMware GSX Server: VMware recommends you do not migrate a Red Hat Linux 7.3 virtual machine between hosts when one host is running on an AMD processor and the other is running on an Intel processor.

During the Red Hat Linux 7.3 installation, Red Hat 7.3 chooses a kernel that is optimized for the specific processor on which it is running. The kernel may contain instructions that are only available for that processor. These instructions can have adverse effects when run on a host with the wrong type of processor.

Thus, a Red Hat Linux 7.3 virtual machine created on a host with an AMD processor may not work if migrated to a host with an Intel processor. The reverse is also true: a Red Hat Linux 7.3 virtual machine created on a host with an Intel processor may not work if migrated to a host with an AMD processor.

This problem is not specific to virtual machines and would also occur on physical computers. For example, if you moved a hard drive with a Red Hat Linux 7.3 installation from an AMD machine to an Intel machine, you would experience problems trying to boot from that drive.