Wed, 21 Dec 2005

Boot/run the Quantian iso via VMware Player

Tom Short, author of Rpad, emailed me today saying that he was running the newest Quantian inside an instance of the free (as in beer) VMware Player.

And indeed, lo and behold, it works. Quite well, actually. Hhere is what I did:

Grab the VMware Player

I tried the rpm first, but the installation needs some post-installation mojo for kernel modules, networking, etc which the alien-created deb did not provide. So take the tarball, expand it and configure the player running vmware-install.pl All defaults were sane on my Kubuntu desktop, no complaints.

Adapt the definition of the .vmx file

Tom sent me this Quantian.vmx file based on something from Damn Small Linux. It worked for me (TM) -- accept the suggested creation of a new uuid.

Launch vmplayer

And select the (suitably adapted) Quantian.vmx. At the bootprompt, say 'knoppix' or 'linux24' And the bootprocess should proceed. Tom reported he also needed the Knoppix cheatcode 'noscsi'. I didn't.

I then tried to be cute and started two Quantian instances (which can be done if you copy the .vmx file to a new file), started both in kernel 2.4 and tried openMosix, It didn't start immediately, presumably because the test for /proc/hpc got tricked by the /proc filesystem of the non-openMosix host. A quick 'mkdir mfs; /etc/init.d/openmosix start' later, things started to roll. However, while the two machines 'saw' each other, no actual job sharing seemed to occur. They also did not 'see' the laptop running outside the hosted VMware setting even though all machines were on the same 192.168.1. subnet. Maybe a simple configuration issue, maybe not.

All in all, a pleasant surprise that I was able to set all this up in a couple of minutes.

Update: Fixed URL for the Quantian.vmx file.

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