Hi

I must admit that I'm a newbie to VMware. My goal is to configure my HP EliteBook 8740W laptop as a portabel demo/test for ESXi and zero-clients and/or Oracle SunRay clients.

I quickly found out that the Intel 82577LM Gigabit ethernet chipset is not supported by ESXi, but tanks to the e1000e2 driver developed by hardworker and the script from Varazir, I was able to build a custom oem.tgz and install ISO image that works for the 82577LM chipset.

However there is one problem. Since I have no other computer running vClient I must do all configuration from the tech console. This would have been ok if my keyboard was recognized. However it appears to me that ESXi 4.1 build 348481 does not support Norwegian keyboard layout, correct me if I am wrong. Using "vi" etc, when your keys have shifted place from were they use to be is a challenge!!!

So I got hold of an ESXi 4.1 build 260247 DVD from a colleague of mine. This has support for my keyboard layout but again no support for the NIC, so the installation bails out when it detects no network. During installation it asks for custom driver CD, but I havent been able to find any documentation of what the layout of this CD shall look like. Tried to burn the oem.tgz to CD but it was not recognized as a valid driver CD, so clearly it must be built in a specific undocumented way.

I have noticed that the layout of the image DVD differs extensively from the one that I used to build the custom image. The files and directories are not packed or zipped in any way, and it appears that it uses regular rpm's for installation (is this part of the Weasel(?) project?) The DVD layout is as follows:

- README (contains product ESX 4.1 and bla,bla,bla)
- open_source_licenses.txt (more bla,bla,bla (probably necessary for the US justice system))
- build_number (text file contains: 240247)
- packages.xml (a list of all packeges to install I guess)
- upgrade_info.xml
- upgrade (directory contains scripts)
- precheck.py
- grubupdate.py
- misc (directory contains scripts)
- createinstdepot.py
- brandiso.py
- isolinux (directory contains DVD bootenvironment)
- VMware (directory)
- base (directory)
- comps.xml
- RPMS (directory containing rpm's)
- *.rpm (OS and drivers)
- packageData.pkl

My theory is that it should be possible to inject an rpm containing the neccessary driver for my custom chipset in the VMware/RPMS directory. I had a look at some of the driver rpm's and it appears to me that I only need three files in the rpm to implement the new driver:
- etc/vmware/pciid/e1000e2.xml
- etc/vmware/init/manifests/vmware-e1000e2.mf
- usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/e1000e2.o

I have created the .xml and .mf file based on the ones used for the e1000e driver and modified them to be used with the e1000e2 driver. The e1000e2.o file was extracted from hardworkers oem-8086-10f0-v1119.tgz file referenced elsewhere on this site. So far so good.

My first obstacle is to build the rpm. I downloaded and installed CentOS 5.6 and rpmbuild on my laptop for this purpose. I read as much as I could on building rpm's, looked through a few tutorials and adopted the .spec file to my own setup with some changes. I tried to build the rpm, lots of error messages. Modified the .spec file and tried again. Got rid of the error messages but the rpmbuild command generates no rpm for me. Probably some config error I have somewhere, but I have never done it before so I don't know where to start looking...

So my first question is: Is there anybody out there who knows how to pack three existing files into a new rpm for vmware?

I assume the next steps would be to update the packages.xml with an entry for the new rpm. Then update the VMware/base/comps.xml accordingly. From the few and vague descriptions I have seen on the internet, the VMware/RPMS/packageData.pkl file is updated when executing the misc/createinstdepot.py script. As I understand you also have to run the misc/brandiso.py afterwards.

Am I way out of line here?


Regards

Oddgeir

You might find it easier to add the keyboard support you need to ESXi. With ESXi the keyboard maps are stored in /usr/share/keymaps. You can see the list that comes with ESXi below. The file "list" determines which are available is the DCUI. You'll note that ESXi comes with the Dvorak layout, but that is not available in the DCUI because it is not listed in "list".

So to add the support you would want from ESX you would have to:
1) Extract the keyboard map file from ESX
2) Update your custom oem.tgz file to include
A) an updated list file
B) your keyboard map file.

Note that if the keyboard map file from ESX just has the .map extension that you'll need to gzip the file before you add it to your custom oem.tgz file.

Forgot the image.