Installing Fedora Core 3 Inside a VMWare Virtual Machine

Several months ago, I tried installing [Fedora Core 2](http://fedora.redhat.com) inside a VMWare virtual machine. The experience was less than satisfying. Installation process took an obscene amount of time, and even a simple booting took no less than 20 minutes! :( Mind you, I haven’t had the chance to install FC2 in a real hardware, so I can’t compare the results.

Last night I tried installing the newest version of Fedora Core which is version 3 on the same virtual machine. Installation took very long (about four hours) for an ‘everything’ install. This is way too long for my taste considering I was installing it from ISO images, not from a physical CDROM. Booting process inside VMware is slightly improved, it no longer takes 20 minutes just to reach the login prompt. However I did stumbled upon a service that prevented it to make a complete boot. It just hung there without response. My solution is to apply the instructions I’ve found on [Kerneltrap](http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/4030). After I did those instructions, my FC3 installation became noticeably faster.

If you want to use FC3 inside VMWare, I suggest you follow the [instructions from Kerneltrap](http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/4030), if you can survive the installation process, that is. :)

7 comments

  1. thats probably due to your hardware.
    I’ve just installed FC3 on vmware 4.5.2 under windows XP pro (SP2), with 1GB RAM (but vmware only has 256mb, and a 2.5GHz Pentium 4 CPU. And its taken around 45mins (im doing a full install).
    I havnet booted it yet because i had to go to college. But on the same box, i hav a virtual machine of rhel4-beta 2 which i would say has alot of similaritys with fc3, and it boots in around 2 mins after stoping all unneeded services.

  2. I did an install in FC3 yesterday and it has been fine. The install didn’t take that long and over all I’m happy with it. So not sure what happened with yours… :(

    Installed from CDs, VMWare 4.5.2, hardware, Dell Latitude D505, 1GB Mem (but only 256 for FC3). When creating the new VM I just selected RedHat and went with the defaults – only changed HDD drive size to 6GB. As for the RedHat install, just did workstation and stuck with defaults.

    As you can see, nothing special.

    Mind you, I did just try and install the VMWare tools for fun, and then I could no longer start X as it could not find the mouse. But uninstalled the vmware tools, now it seems all good again..

  3. Hi Priyadi! I recently had the same experience, and I’ve posted my notes on installing Fedora Core 3 on VMWare 4.5.2.

    The only place I’ve noticed performance problems is in X windows; even with VMWare tools installed, so that the video is accelerated, X just plain chugs. I’m planning to build the minimal kernel described in the Kerneltrap article, but since it’s X specifically that’s so slow, I’m not expecting much.

  4. Hi Priyadi! I’ve also recently posted my notes on installing Fedora Core 3 on VMWare 4.5.2.

    The only performance issues I’ve noticed are in X windows. X in RH9 (on VMWare 4.0) was blindingly fast, and hardly used any CPU. On the other hand, X in FC3 (on both VMWare 4.0 and 4.5.2) just plain chugs. I’ve tried with and without VMWare tools, I’ve tried not using resource hogs like gaim and firefox, but so far no luck. On average, during light activity like typing in a text editor, X itself takes up 30-60% of the CPU. Sigh.

    I’m planning to try out the minimal kernel described in the Kerneltrap article, but since it’s X specifically that’s so slow, I’ll keep my expectations low. Still, fingers crossed…and thanks again for the article!

  5. I have installed fc4 on my vmware and everything seems to work fine! even mplayer installed properly and i’m watching movies without any problems..
    however, i want to do a kernel-only installation and wanted to use vmmachine only for running some server daemons.. >:) any clues?

  6. hi,
    i recently installed fedora core 3 under vmware workstation 5, with the host OS being windows 2000 with a RAM of 256MB. the installation process worked perfectly but was very slow(it took abt 3 hrs to just install) and then after the installation process was completed, when i rebooted it, the grub came on and said that it was booting fedora in 5 seconds and then there was no response.
    can u tell me where are those instuctions in kerneltrap.org so that i can find some remedy to this booting problem.

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