VM Appliance: vmgentoo

This Appliance

This gentoo appliance was built on top of an earlier 383MB 2006.0 gentoo appliance build, provided by one of the vmware in-house programmers.

However, I have added to it:

• I added X, kde, emacs, and seamonkey (mozilla). X has been configured so that it starts kde.
• I added some use flags, too.
• I have brought all packages up-to-date.
• The text window is now 1024x768, instead of 640x480.
• gentoo requires a variety of housekeeping tasks (revdep-rebuild; etc-update). this appliance has been well cleaned and thus should be quite usable.

I did not install the vmware tools. I believe I read somewhere that they have no advantages in this configuration (latest xorg), but I do not know this for sure. I know for sure that the gentoo appliance window can be resized by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

I have tried this appliance under gentoo as a host, too. Gentoo can be a very nice host to itself!

PS: My own use for this applicance is on a notebook computer. My goal is to make it unnecessary to figure out how to make weird computer notebook hardware work under linux. The drawback of this strategy is that you are better off running media-related software and games on windows rather than linux. Arguably, such media applications are where Windows still is better than linux, anyway, because vendors don't like to port to linux. (Skype w/ Video, Sightstream, iTunes, Logitech video cams, Naturally-speaking, etc.) FWIW, not even vmware workstation under vmgentoo can handle fast USB video access cleanly. It only offers USB 1.1, and in practice is stutter-and-go-and-stutter if you try to run a logitech quickcam fusion in the vm appliance.

Downloading Necessary VMWare Software

You can run this appliance either under the vmplayer, under vmserver (you need to use their webpage to get a free license code), or under their for-pay products.

If you have vmware's ear:

• It would make life much easier if they had the option to mount a local server partition directly. I know it breaks security, so they should put big warnings signs up when a user allows this. (No, an appliance should not be able to do this; only the user should be allowed to set this in vmware's preferences.) It could be restricted to certain partitions only. But non-network related disk access could make life a lot easier for non network administrators.
• Their USB device needs work. It would open up many more uses to vmware if it could access USB at native speed. I am not sure why it cannot.

I would also love to find out what effect processor virtualization support (Pacifica, Vandenpool) has on the performance of vmware virtual machines.

Thanks to vmware (and to its competition) for making such terrific software freely available.

Downloading

I do not have the bandwidth to serve this up if there is large demand, so if you copy it, please host it, too. If you cannot download the file, it may be because I have protected it in order to save my server from overloading. In any case, the filename is (and future versions will be) unique enough that a google search should find it.

For now, the filename is Gentoo-2006jul22-withkde.zip. The md5sum is in Gentoo-2006jul22-withkde.zip.md5sum and

 b39f5884534af9538b392efe0afc15f4 Gentoo-2006jul22-withkde.zip

Byte Size=1,004,648,350. Yes, it is over 1GB in size. Don't even try to download this file without a very fast and reliable Internet link.

The appliance does not include its distfiles. They are 840MB in size. If you want those, too, download vmgentoo-2006jul22-withkde-distfiles.zip. (not yet up.)

There is no warranty and no support on this appliance. I can only promise that there is no malware on this CD that I intentionally installed. There is the risk that one of the gentoo packages has some malware. Fortunately, you are relatively safer with this vmware appliance than you would be with ordinary programs. It should be pretty difficult for malware to escape the appliance. (Yes, there is more risk if you install other software natively.)