Le blog de Régis

VMware hacks

This week-end, I have played with [VMware player](http://www.vmware.com/download/player/) which is a free (as beer) tool to run an existing VMware image.

There are already several nice community-made images you can download and play with. This is very convenient to

try another operating systems like [Haiku operating system](http://haiku-os.org/) or [Gentoo linux](http://gentoo.org/)
try softwares without to deal with a long or complex installation procedure, like [open ACS content management system](http://www.jsequeira.com/projects/oasisvm/) or [Bugzilla](http://bugzilla.org/)

Why not hack an existing image to install something else? For exemple, you can download the gentoo image and install [mediawiki](http://www.mediawiki.org/) on top of it, thus making a new « mediawiki VMware image » (based on gentoo linux). If we go a little step further, you an even [change the operating system](http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000153064739/).

When you have a closer look, you’ll discover that a VMware image is described with a simple text-based file with the extension .vmx. This files has a syntax similar to Java properties files. Most parameters are straightforward, you can change the displayName for instance.

Now, you can even change the virtual harddisks. The disks are described in ide<a>.<b>. There are only 4 IDE disks available in the guest operating system (plus the floppy disk):

ide0.0 is /dev/hda (C: on DOS)
ide0.1 is /dev/hdb (D: on DOS)
ide1.0 is /dev/hdc (E: on DOS)
ide1.1 is /dev/hdd (F: on DOS)

For instance

ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.fileName = "gentoo.vmdk"
ide0:0.deviceType = "disk"
ide0:0.redo = ""

VMDK files are virtual disks. They are not easy to generate properly, that’s why I recommand to base your hacked image on an existing image (provided by VMware themselves ;-))

Note that you can also mount an iso image (from the host OS) into your CDROM drive (inside the guest OS):

ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "ubuntu-5.10-install-i386.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
ide1:0.startConnected = "FALSE"
ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"

Or if you’d like, you let your real CDROM drive (which is /dev/hda in my host system) be visible inside the guest OS

ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "/dev/hda"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

Finally, and this was the most tricky, you can use a real harddisk partition inside the guest host. Here is how to have /dev/hdc2 visible as /dev/hdd inside the guest:

ide1.1:present = "TRUE"
ide1.1:filename = "/dev/hdc2"
ide1.1:redo = ""
ide1.1:deviceType = "ata-hardDisk"

If I find some time, I’ll tell you what I have found out on vmdk files.