Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0

Support

This beta version of this guest operating system has experimental support on the following VMware products:

General Installation Notes

Be sure to read General Guidelines for All VMware Products as well as this guide to installing your specific guest operating system.

The easiest method of installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 in a virtual machine is to use the standard Red Hat distribution CD. The notes below describe an installation using the standard distribution CD; however, installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 via the boot floppy/network method is supported as well. If your VMware product supports it, you may also install from a PXE server.

Before installing the operating system, be sure that you have already created and configured a new virtual machine.

Note: Be sure the virtual machine is configured with at least 256MB of memory. If the virtual machine has less than 256MB of memory, Red Hat Enterprise Linux presents an error message as it loads certain VMware drivers.

Installation Steps

  1. Insert the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive.
  2. Power on the virtual machine to start installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0.
  3. Follow the installation steps as you would for a physical machine. Be sure to make the choices outlined in the following steps.
  4. Allow automatic partitioning of the disk to occur in the Automatic Partitioning screen or partition the virtual disk manually if you do not want to use the Red Hat defaults.
  5. You may see a warning that begins "The partition table on device <devicename> was unreadable. To create new partitions it must be initialized, causing the loss of ALL DATA on the drive." This does not mean that anything is wrong with the hard drive on your physical computer. It simply means that the virtual hard drive in your virtual machine needs to be partitioned and formatted.

    Click Yes to partition the drive.

This completes basic installation of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 guest operating system.

VMware Tools

Be sure to install VMware Tools in your guest operating system. For details, see the manual for your VMware product or follow the appropriate link in the knowledge base article at www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=340.

Do not start the X server in the guest operating system until you install VMware Tools.

Known Issues

PAE Message During Installation

VMware Workstation: If your host computer has a processor that includes NX (no execute) technology you may get an error message during installation. The message says the guest operating system is trying to use PAE. The NX technology is present in AMD processors including Athlon64, Opteron and Sempron. It is also present in Intel EMT64-capable processors.

To avoid the problem, be sure the virtual machine is powered off, then use a text editor to edit the configuration (.vmx) file for the affected virtual machine. Add the following line to the file:

paevm="true"

You can then power on the virtual machine and install the guest operating system.

Clock in Guest Operating System May Run Too Quickly or Too Slowly

If the clock in your guest operating system runs too quickly or too slowly, use one of the workarounds described in the knowledge base article at www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1420.