First, when installing OpenSolaris 2008.05, choose VMware setup options for “Solaris”, and either 32-bit or 64-bit depending on your preference. I wanted, 64-bit, but “Other / Other 64-bit” setup option resulted in strange errors at vm boot time.

You can now mount the VMware tools via the menu option “Virtual Machine” -> “Install VMware Tools”. A CD icon will appear on your desktop. Double-click the CD, and the tar file inside there. Untar the files onto your desktop. Open a terminal. Become root. Before you run the script, we need to create some directories to help the installation complete.


# su -
(password)
# mkdir -p /usr/dt/config/Xsession.d
# mkdir -p /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d
# cd ~/Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib
# ./vmware-install.pl
(run the script)
# cd /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d
# ln -s /usr/dt/config/Xsession.d/9999.autostart-vmware-user.sh


What we did above was create and old directory the install script wanted to use, a new directory that will be used by gdm (the login manager), and then linked the files accordingly.

If you log out (or reboot), and log back in, you will now see:


$ ps -ae |grep vmware
794 ? 0:03 vmware-m
868 ? 0:07 vmware-g
12428 ? 0:04 vmware-u

The vmware-u is the vmware-user process that needs to get launched, so that features like autoresize and copy & paste will work.

Now — on to play with ZFS!