VMWare Workstation 5.5.4 List of Modules for Gentoo

Message

katsiki · Post by **katsiki** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 7:12 am

How can I find a comprehensive list of modules specific to Gentoo 2006.1 or Gentoo 2007.0 running as a virtual guest machine on a VMWare Workstation 5.5.4 host? For lack of knowledge of which version is best, I'm trying to install 2.6.20-gentoo-r8.

warrawarra · Post by **warrawarra** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 4:47 pm

If you are worried that something might not install you can get vmware installed onto gentoo and then once finished run "revdep-rebuild" or add "-X" to this if it fails and it will make sure all dependacny's is installed and working. This will work for gentoo guest on a windows pc or similar as well with revdep-rebuild in gentoo guest.

It has been several months since I did it so my info might be a bit off.

If running vmware on host OS (say windows) and then installing gentoo onto vmware as a guest then all the hardware that vmware uses in it's virtual machine should have it's modules installed during the gentoo install.
How to check for this is once gentoo is installed and running on vmware run "lspci" and if some of them is listed unknown then it would need a module to get it working.
This module would be hardware specific o]and once you know the hardware it uses you can manually load a module.

Vmware worked like this last time:
It uses it's own video card (faking one) and then uses mostly the hardware that is in your pc say motherboard / sound parts and then fakes networking and can fake the hd as well virtual hd or you can let it use your hd directly but this is a bit unsafe , virtual hd is safer.

The list of modules for running gentoo inside vmware is likely at their vmware website forum or google for "vmware gentoo guest" and you should find several links with good info in it.

You can maybe for a first run install windows into vmware as a guest os and make sure all hardware is working then copy the hardware info and install gentoo in vmware and build the kernel with all hardware modules installed already.

Hope all this helps or gets you going in the right direction.

RoundsToZero · Post by **RoundsToZero** » Tue Jun 26, 2007 2:22 pm

Network is pcnet32 (or vmxnet if you install VMware Tools), sound is esoniq 1371, video is vmware (VIDEO_CARDS="vmware" for the X server), mouse is vmmouse (INPUT_DEVICES="vmmouse" for the X server), virtual SCSI hard drives use Fusion MPT, virtual IDE hard drives show up as Intel for me but that could be just because my host has Intel chipset (you should be using virtual SCSI anyway but you'll need IDE for the virtual CD drive).

katsiki · Post by **katsiki** » Fri Jun 29, 2007 9:11 am

I guess it was a dumb question, for it is a matter of looking at lsmod. But thanks for the hints about the basic modules, fusion, pcnet32, etc.

I tried using genkernel, and then adding in all the modules, but file system isn't recognized on boot. Seems it is necessary to manually configure a kernel to include the virtual scsi stuff, etc. as modules. So I'll be plugging away at it.

RoundsToZero · Post by **RoundsToZero** » Mon Jul 02, 2007 8:26 pm

To make sure the root partition will be recognized when you boot the VM, you need to have SCSI support, SCSI disk support, and Fusion MPT support compiled in as opposed to as modules.