I’ve spent too much of my day installing SUSE Linux 10.1 as a guest OS using VMware Player on my Dell Latitude D620 running Windows XP. It’s not rocket science, but having never used VMWare before I sent myself down a couple of long, meandering dead-ends. Should you want to do this, hopefully, this will keep you from making the same wrong turns.

But first, a side note! I can hear you asking now “Why do you want to do this?” Well, I do. I hate developing under Windows, hate Cygwin even more (call it personal preference), but still prefer using a text editor (emacs) and a unix command line. Yeah, I should have bought a Mac instead. That’s another story. Anyway, here is the process.

Preliminaries
First, go get all the stuff you’re going to need:

• Download the SUSE Linux 10.1 ISOs and burn them onto CDs. I used Roxio Creator Plus which came with my machine to do the burning.
• Download VMware Player. Install.
• Download this zip file (courtesy of this fine post which was quite helpful.) Unzip this into a directory on a disk with plenty of space. Rename all of the files from “OS” to “sl10-1″.

Modify the VMware configuration file
Make this series of edits to “sl10-1.vmx”.

First, we need to tell VMware that we do not have a floppy drive. Remove this line:

floppy0.fileName = "A:"

Replace it with:

floppy0.present "FALSE"

Now we need to tell VMware to load the operating system from the CDs we will put in the CD drive. Change these lines:

ide1:0.fileName = "c:\image.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

to:

ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

Finally, change this line:

ide0:0.fileName = "OS.vmdk"

to:

ide0:0.fileName = "sl10-1.vmdk"

Run VMware and install SUSE
Put the first first SUSE CD in the CD drive. Run VMware and load the “sl10-1.vmx”. At this point in time, you should be able to install SUSE as normal. When I did this, almost everything worked, except my wireless network.

Getting the wireless network to work
After you’ve installed SUSE if you type “lspci” you will see that SUSE knows about an AMD networking card, but not your actual wired or wireless network card. THIS IS CORRECT.

What is happening is that VMware shows this dummy network card to SUSE, and patches it through to an actual network device on the host machine. If you have more than one active network connection, VMware will pick which one of those network connections for you. In my case, it chose the wired network connection, which gave the impression that the wireless network connection was not working.

You can tell VMware which networking connection to use by running the Virtual Network Editor:

<Program Directory> > VMware > VMware Player > vmnetcfg.exe


Go to the “Host Virtual Network Mapping” tab. Change the value of VMnet0 from “Bridged to an automatically chosen adapter” to your wireless card (in my case a Dell 1490). Hit “Okay” and everything should be okay!

Have fun
Now you should be able to have all sorts of wireless unixy fun. Good luck!