FreeBSD 9.2 on VMware Workstation 9.0.2

· 3 min read

Tonight I decided I really wanted to switch to freebsd from Ubuntu. The move was not because ubuntu had issues, but rather because I felt that I would enjoy the experience of freebsd more than that of linux. It was going to be a new world, with a different way of making things work.

So the items I list below will show the steps that I went through to get freebsd working smoothly on vmware.

Note: I will assume you have already installed freebsd and will not walk through those steps"

  1. Installing gnome2
  2. Installing rc.conf
  3. Install VM tools
  4. Configure Xorg
  5. Installing Screen Tools
  6. Acknowledgements

Install gnome2

To install gnome2 the steps that I took are below.

  1. Install gnome2

     cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome2
 make install clean

  2. Install xorg

     cd /usr/ports/x11/xorg
 make install clean

  3. Create the initial xorg.conf file

     Xorg -configure
 cp /root/xorg.conf.new $HOME/xorg.conf

At this time the gnome2 desktop should be installed so we can complete.

Configure rc.conf

The next step is to configure rc.conf to startup by default. This can be done by adding the below two lines to /etc/rc.conf and than rebooting.

    # DBus and HALd
    dbus_enable="YES"
    hald_enable="YES"
    
    # VMware tools
    vmware_guest_vmblock_enable="YES"
    vmware_guest_vmhgfs_enable="YES"
    vmware_guest_vmmemctl_enable="YES"
    vmware_guest_vmxnet_enable="YES"
    vmware_guestd_enable="YES"

Install VM tools

There are a few tools that you will want to install to make it so that your vm exprience is the best.

  1. install open-vm-tools

     cd /usr/ports/emulators/open-vm-tools
 make install clean

  2. install the mouse tools

     cd /usr/ports/x11-drivers/xf86-input-vmmouse
 make install clean

  3. install the vmware tools (from the vmware dvd)

     tar -xvf vmware-freebsd-tools.tar.gz
 cd vmware-tools-distrib
 ./vmware-install.pl

Configure Xorg

You will need to configure the screen and input devices to make them work correctly with a virtual system.

    Section "ServerLayout"
      Identifier "X.org Configured"
      Screen 0 "VMScreen" 0 0
      InputDevice "VMMouse" "CorePointer"
      InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" 
    EndSection
    
    Section "InputDevice"
      Identifier "VMMouse"
      Driver "vmmouse"
      Option "Protocol" "auto"
      Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
      Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
    EndSection
    
    Section "Monitor"
      Identifier "VMMonitor"
      VendorName "VMware, Inc"
    EndSection
    
    Section "Device"
      Identifier "VMware SVGA"
      Driver "vmware"
    EndSection

    Section "Screen"
      Identifier "VMScreen" 
      Device "VMware SVGA"
      Monitor "VMMonitor"
      ...
    EndSection

Install Screen tools

To install the screen tools you need to install a few development tools like git, wget and dependencies.

  1. Install the gsed dependency

     cd /usr/ports/textproc/gsed
 make install clean

  2. Install the newt dependency (include python support)

     cd /usr/ports/devel/newt
 make install clean

  3. Install tmux

     cd /usr/ports/sysutils/tmux
 make install clean

  4. Install byobu (for tmux support need downloaded version) - Last version used 5.60

     cd $HOME
 wget https://launchpad.net/byobu/trunk/5.60/+download/byobu_5.60.orig.tar.gz
 tar -xvf byobu_5.60.orig.tar.gz
 ./configure --prefix="$HOME/byobu"
 make 
 make install clean
 echo "echo "export PATH=$HOME/byobu/bin:$PATH" &ltsp;&ltsp; $HOME/.bashrc
 source $HOME/.bashrc

Acknowledgements

As you can imagine the majority of this information was info that I found while online. As such, I like to share links to the sites that I used to access this information.