On Windows 7, I installed CentOS 5.6 as a development server on VMware Player.

For the installation procedure, you can just follow the articles below:

・Installing CentOS on VMware Player. Building a Practice Web Server 1

Here, I’ll write a complementary article for parts that were unclear even after reading this. 　

Step 1　Installing VMware Player

Download and install VMware Player.

・VMware Player: Free Software for Easy Virtual Machine Execution 　

Step 2　Virtual Machine Configuration

Install CentOS on the virtual machine. For development purposes, I’ll install the 32-bit version.

CentOS 5.6 x86 (32-bit version)

By the way, “LiveCD” is a trial version, so download the “official version” which is about 4GB. There are two ways to download the official version: download via BitTorrent or download the ISO for network installation.

This time, I downloaded the ISO file for network installation and installed it.

(If you might install multiple times, it would be better to download from BitTorrent and keep the ISO file.)

・Download site：www.centos.org - centos.org content

For CentOS 5.6 x86, the ISO file is “CentOS-5.6-i386-netinstall.iso”. Select “Linux” for the guest OS type and “CentOS” for the version.

After this, proceed smoothly following the site’s instructions. 　

Step 3 Starting CentOS Network Installer on VMware Player

When asked for the installation method, select FTP since you selected the network installation ISO. For FTP site and directory specification, you can find out by following the directory hierarchy from the URL (http://ftp.riken.jp/) on the Software archives at ftp.riken.jp page.

For CentOS 5.6 32-bit, the URL would be as follows:

web site name: ftp.riken.jp CentOS directory: Linux/centos/5.6/os/i386/

Also, for CentOS 5.5 64-bit, the URI would be as follows:

web site name: ftp.riken.jp CentOS directory: Linux/centos/5.5/os/x86_64

“Starting installation process. This may take several minutes…” is displayed, but when installing via FTP connection, it takes much more than several minutes.

(I waited about 20 minutes. Depending on network congestion, it might take over an hour.) 　

Step 4　Starting CentOS Installation on VMware Player

Proceed smoothly here as well. However, pay attention to the following two points:

• In "Region Selection," uncheck "Use UTC for system clock"
• Select modules to include during installation (If you can configure yourself, it's apparently better to install with minimal components to avoid unnecessary items)

I installed only the following:

• "Applications": Editors
• "Development": Development Tools
• "Servers": Server
• "Base System": Base

Continue smoothly with the installation in the same manner. 　

Step 5　Installing Apache, MySQL, PHP

Once CentOS installation is complete, install MySQL, Apache, and PHP in that order by compiling from source code to run as a virtual server.

I’ll introduce the installation procedures for these in separate articles.

That’s all.

That’s all from the Gemba.