Monday, January 08, 2007

Suse 10.2 64-bit and VMWare Server

Need a 64-bit server so we can run our VMWare machines on it and utilize the 8+ gig of RAM. Originally tried CentOS but because VMWare Server is compiled against 32-bit libraries, it would be a nasty amount of work to install the needed libraries one-by-one (ldd spit out at least 20 libraries we needed). After digging around online it turns out that VMWare "officially" supports Suse but not much else. Time was of the essence and we bagged Gentoo for that reason.

The 10.1 install was pleasant, but the user experience was very unpleasant. I didn't actually install it, but a coworker did and it was only a matter of days until he migrated to Ubuntu. We were hoping that some of the usability issues were resolved in 10.2, happy to report that is the case. We installed the base system, developer libraries, kernel development and the 32-bit libraries during the initial package selection. After that, once the system was up and running, vmware installed without issue.

To use vnc (via ssh) we enabled Remote Login in Login Window Preferences (not sure why that's a System Application but not in the Control Center). The command to enable port forwarding for local vncviewer execution is "ssh -g -L localhost:5901:machine:5901 user@machine -X", then "vncviewer localhost::5901" will connect right up through that ssh tunnel (also, ssh with the -g enables anyone to use your tunnel).

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