As most of you know that read my blogs or twitter posts, I work with more than one virtualization vendor’s products. VMware has a huge library of virtual appliances, but it’s a bit of a hassle to convert them to other platforms.

Recently I’ve been working on upgrading our training and demo kits.  Part of our upgrade is to have the setups self documented by using a dedicated internal wiki on the kits themselves. I looked at several options including doing a fresh build from scratch.

Eventually, I found Turnkey Linux appliances. I like them because they aren’t already built appliances for one vendor;  instead, they are Ubuntu server .iso files with the software already installed and configured. That way you can install on pretty much any virtualization vendor that supports Ubuntu or Debian as a guest OS. Then it’s just a matter of installing the tools.

I installed a Mediawiki appliance on ESX  (New Virtual Machine>Ubuntu 32-bit, defaults on CPU and RAM and whatever size disk you want) and here are the post install steps to get the  VMware tools installed.

Refresh to the latest repositories.

• apt-get update

Install the missing packages:

• apt-get install gcc
• apt-get install make
• apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.24-23-generic (check your version of the kernel and match it)

Insert virtual CD ROM image by selecting  ”install vmware tools”  from the VM’s Edit  menu.
mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-xxxx.xxx…tar.gz  /tmp
cd /tmp
tar -zxvf VMwareTools-xxxxx.xxx….tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl

Select the defaults, you may have to tell it to use a newer version of gcc on one of the questions.

You should have the VMWare tools installed at this point.

Upgrade the system

• apt-get upgrade

Start wikiing.