Eric.Chromick.com

Wow! I can’t believe how much has changed since I wrote this post! Puppy has evolved several times, VMware Server is readily available,  so you can create your own virtual disks and host USB support works, in most cases.

Most of the time I boot Puppy 2.02 from CD and store my data on a USB Flash Drive, so my goal was to set up a virtual machine that was as much like my normal Puppy setup as possible. With this .vmx file, I can easily change the name of the ide1:0 ISO file and boot from a different CD image without having to burn a CD. My pup_save.3fs data is stored on the virtual hard drive and I can experiment with the various installation options and “install” alpha and beta releases without having to worry about screwing something up.

Test Setup, Tweaks and Notes:

COMPAQ Presario R3240US Laptop, XP Pro, 768 megs RAM, VMware Player 1.0.2

Even tho it’s a wide-screen laptop, I normally use XVESA 1024x768x24 for compatibility with other machines I use. The Virtual machine is set to XVESA 800x600x16. This seems to be a good combination of size and depth for the Player. Higher color depths, i.e. 24 bit, don’t work on my setup and 640×480 is just too small for me to use.

The format of the virtual drive is Ext3, although I suppose it would be just as happy with Ext2 or MSDOS.

On the first boot, I hit F2 to go into the virtual BIOS and set the boot menu to look at the CD first. It takes a fairly quick <ctrl> G and F2 to get there. If you don’t set the BIOS to boot from CD it will attempt to boot from the virtual hard drive and fail. If this happens, hit <ctrl><alt> to return control to your computer, click on the Player dropdown, Troubleshoot and Reset to reset the VM.

VMware might complain that the location of the virtual machine has changed and offer you some choices. Choose Create.

Although the USB drive is recognized, I haven’t been able to boot from the virtual CD and load the pup_save.3fs from USB.

This is my first attempt at a Puppy VM so YMMV. Use at your own risk.

What you need:

The .vmx file

config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "4"
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
memsize = "128"
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.fileName = "Puppy-2.02.vmdk"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "puppy-2.02-seamonkey.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
floppy0.present = "FALSE"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.connectionType = "nat"
usb.present = "TRUE"
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
sound.fileName = "-1"
sound.autodetect = "TRUE"
displayName = "Puppy-2.02"
guestOS = "otherlinux"
nvram = "Puppy-2.02.nvram"
ide0:0.redo = ""
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
uuid.location = "56 4d 0b ea 8a c7 ee 3e-6b 11 c0 4e 23 8e 86 6a"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 0b ea 8a c7 ee 3e-6b 11 c0 4e 23 8e 86 6a"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:8e:86:6a"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"
tools.remindInstall = "TRUE"
usb.autoConnect.device0 = ""

The puppy-2.02-seamonkey.iso approx 73m