When installing fisher in a virtual machine under VMware (www.vmware.com), fisher fails to start X and falls back to text mode. (Hardly an important problem.) Only error reporting is on the main virtual terminal which quickly dissappears as the menu configution method comes up. Text is from the mouse detection: ---- Found a Generic - 3 Button Mouse (PS/2) Probed X server is None unknown We can use framebuffer fb_check returned with z value unknown We can use framebuffer 0 Using X server /usr/X11R6/bit/XF86_FBDev Cant open /dev/fb0 X Startup failed. Falling back to text mode ----- I had to write this down and retype so sorry if there are errors. Host machine (the one running VMWare) is: - Intel 815EEA motherboard - Pentium III 933 - 2 * 20Gb + 1 * 30 Gb hard drives - DVD-ROM drive - 512 Mb memory - dec tulip ethernet card - RedHat 7.0 - Linux kernel 2.4.1 with upgraded associated utilities. Virtual machine was set up for: - 2 * 2 Gb hard disks - CD-ROM enabled - 64 Mb memory - ethernet enabled - floppy enabled
VMware is not a supported installation platform target.
The reason the vmware graphical install fails is that the Seawolf anaconda never falls back to VGA16. It uses the framebuffer stuff, even if "no framebuffer" is specified on the boot menu. This appears to me to be a logic error in anaconda. I hacked the code a little and managed to create a CD that *does* fall back to VGA16. The vmware install works fine with my CD. That is, if you can call VGA16 "fine" <grin>. In any case, as I see it, the fact that vmware is not a supported platform seems moot. The source of this problem has nothing to do with vmware or any peculiar characteristics of vmware.
Open a request for enhancement bug report against "anaconda" and attach your enhancements to it. Our instller team will go over them and decide wether or not to add it in. Note, I didn't say that VMware would not install because of bugs in VMware, I said VMware is not a supported installation target. This means that if people try to install Red Hat Linux into a VMware virtual machine and it works, that is great. If it does not work, it is not considered a bug because VMware is not a supported platform. Our supported platforms are i386 and alpha currently, and a virtual machine running on i386 is not considered an i386 because it is a virtual environment. There _are_ many issues that _can_ come up with such an environment, and we do not have the resources to cover installation on all of those possible edge cases. Therefore, wether a bug is in VMware or in Red Hat Linux when installed to VMware, it doesn't make any difference because it is not a supported installation target. That said, it doesn't mean that we will not fix something if it is reported to us, preferably with a patch to fix it. What it does mean is that we will not personally expend any engineering effort to troubleshoot and solve problems with unsupported installation targets. As I said though, we gladly accept patches. If your changes are clean, and the anaconda team likes the idea, perhaps they will add it into a future release of Red Hat Linux. Personally I think it is _good_ if Red Hat Linux installs to VMware even if we wont support such configuration, and I'm sure that others feel the same as you and I.