Linux as guest on VMware

I've recently taken an interest on VMs and have started to download Ubuntu and Fedora to use on my Win 7 host. This is my first time using linux and VMware and I was wondering if I need to install all the linux drivers for my system to fully work?

Also, what amount of ram would you suggest to be dedicated to each linux distro?

 

Unless you have a specific reason to be using VMWare, I'd recommend a free alternative like virtualbox.

There are various vmware tools packages to install for different distributions:
VMware KB: General VMware Tools installation instructions
VMware KB: Overview of VMware Tools

There's more general installation info here:
http://pubs.vmware.com/guestnotes/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm

In general you should give a guest OS half (or less) of your free physical RAM (how much is left after the host OS is taken into consideration) and half (or fewer) of your processor cores.

 

Thanks Groceries, I'll take a look at virtualbox as an alternative to VMWare. There's not really a reason for choosing VMware at the first place, just that I've heard people use that before on the forums, hence it's the only VM that I'm aware of.

So far, I'm having some issues with Fedora. For some odd reason, Fedora would constantly toggle between numlock and often makes Fedora freeze. Unfortunately there's no driver support for my external logitech keyboard and this has been a the most annoying issue thus far. I'll try use virtual box and see if the same occurs there.

 

You'll need to use a VM with USB emulation to get a special keyboard driver working. VMware and regular Virtualbox (not virtualbox OSE) have this. Not too sure about the numlock/freezing issue...

 

The hardware in a VM is mostly simulated and it doesn't often match the physical hardware that you have. You may well have a USB keyboard on the host, but you could have a simulated keyboard attached as a PS/2 standard keyboard in the guest OS.

 

I would suggest installing VMWare Tools in the linux you are virtualizing. This irons out the issues I have had before (VMWare Workstation 7.1/Lubuntu).

 

I would suggest you take VirtualBox over vmware, then. The free vmware player and such make it a pain to install from an ISO to a new virtual machine. VirtualBox, it's pretty straightforward. I run many virtual Linux machines, all networked together for testing and such here at work.