I have been using CentOS on production boxes for several years. It is very stable and I don’t have a pay a yearly support fee to RedHat. I should note that if I could afford it I would gladly go with RedHat as they offer some great web management options.
So, I have a test box here that I am going to bring online. The server is only going to host virtual machines so I want a lean and mean CentOS install. I installed the minimal CentOS 4.3 x64 and VMware Server and then ran into a problem. Since I only run OS X at home I didn’t have an easy way to run the console which is Linux or Windows only.
First thing is to install X11 on your Mac if you haven’t already. It turns out this isn’t installed by default on the Intel Macs but you can find it on your install DVD by running the Optional Packages program.
Next up you have to install some packages to get the X11 support in place on your VMWare server:
- yum install gcc glibc compat-libstdc* compat-glibc* compat-db* zlib zlib-devel*
- yum install pam pam-devel
- yum install xorg-x11-libs
- yum install xorg-x11-devel
- yum install fonts-xorg*
Fire up X11 and ssh into your VMWare box. Set your display to be your OS X box: DISPLAY=192.168.0.0:0.0 ; export DISPLAY (if you get permission denied run ‘xhost +’ in an xterm). Then run the vmware-server-console in the xterm and you should see the VMWare Server Console!
Help from: Tao of Mac, VMTN, and VMTN.
