I set up an OpenIndiana vm in VMware Fusion (see earlier post) but while setting it up, I accidentally selected “Other” for the guest OS type instead of “Solaris”. As a result, later on when I wanted to install VMware Tools, it wasn’t available in the menu because the system didn’t know which CD image to mount.

The fix was to edit the guestOS setting in the .vmx file.

But first I needed to figure out what the valid settings are for guestOS.

I took a clue from this page and did this:

$ strings '/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-vmx' | egrep '^solaris[0-9]'
solaris6
solaris8
solaris9
solaris10-64
solaris11
solaris11-64
solaris10
solaris7

From this, I knew that I needed to put:

guestOS = "solaris11-64"

in /Users/marca/Documents/Virtual\ Machines/OpenIndiana\ Build\ 151a\ Desktop.vmwarevm/OpenIndiana\ Build\ 151a\ Desktop.vmx