How to launch ISO and use LiveCDs inside VMware Player

Friday, October 21, 2005   |   7 Comments   |   addthis
VMware Player can be used to run any precreated virtual machine by VMware Workstation, GSX Server and ESX Server (and even Microsoft Virtual PC and Virtual Server VMs). But how to run a LiveCD Linux (like Knoppix), BSD (like FreeSBIE) or OpenSolaris (like ShilliX) distribution? You cannot cause you don't have an empty virtual machine where to map your LiveCD ISO. How-to launch ISOs First of all you need a virtual machine configuration file (something .vmx), where every virtual hardware aspect is defined (from memory size to how many ethernet NICs are available). You can google around and find many of them or your can grab this one from virtualization.info: livecd.vmx Now you need to edit it (Notepad is enough) to map your LiveCD ISO on the virtual CDRom: just search for livecd.iso and replace with your ISO name. Save the edited .vmx file and you are ready to launch it with VMware Player! Note: to achieve better performances and compatibility you could change the guestOS = "otherlinux" (generic Linux distribution) string inside livecd.vmx accordingly to your livecd OS in this way:
  • Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition = "winnetstandard"
  • Windows XP Professional = "winxppro"
  • Red Hat Linux (generic) = "redhat"
  • SuSE Linux (generic) = "suse"
  • Netware 6 = "netware6"
  • Solaris 10 (experimental) = "solaris10"
  • FreeBSD (generic) = "freebsd"
To simplify and speed up the .vmx creation you could use the VMX-builder utility. You could also want to create a brand new virtual machine with virtual disks (.vmdk) for VMware Player. If so read my How to create a new virtual machine with VMware Player post about it.

Comments

This is very good information. You might also note there is an Ubutu free browser-configured available from VMware. I haven't yet downloaded it yet myself though, but being able to play a custom Bart's PE ISO would help lock down my kids' machines.

By Blogger Kent, at Saturday, October 22, 2005 4:03:00 AM 

Thank you Kent for posting a comment.

I already wrote about VMware free browser appliance on this post:
http://www.virtualization.info/2005/10/vmware-offers-browser-appliance.html

By Anonymous Alessandro Perilli, at Saturday, October 22, 2005 12:29:00 PM 

Very nice and handy. Have one issue though, when trying the Knoppix and FreeBSD bootable CDs you listed, I can't seem to get the VMPlayer to recognize the "ctrl-alt" key sequence to return me to the host machine. Haven't had this issue with other virtual machines (but have not tried many). Any suggestions on a config file edit, or the like to help this? (Or should I redirect this question to VMWare itself?)

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Tuesday, October 25, 2005 8:41:00 PM 

About VMware questions (how to pass ctrl-alt-del to virtual machine etc): please RTFM (that's download and read Player manual) and visit Vmware newsgroups: news://news.vmware.com

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sunday, October 30, 2005 10:58:00 AM 

I started with a vmx-builder - to add some more options when creating a VM from scratch.
See http://sanbarrow.com/vmxbuilder.html

Ulli

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Monday, October 31, 2005 3:12:00 AM 

To send ctrl-alt-del, type ctrl-alt-ins.

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Saturday, November 26, 2005 5:21:00 AM 

He said "Ctrl-Alt" not "Ctrl-Alt-Del"... To state the obvious, those are different!

By Anonymous me, at Tuesday, March 20, 2007 1:17:00 AM 

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