Installing on VMware Workstation

The following section will guide you through the steps to install CachyOS on VMware Workstation.

Download the latest ISO

Download latest CachyOS ISO as described in Downloading CachyOS.

Creating a Virtual Machine

The following section assumes you have VMware Workstation installed on your system and set up correctly.

1. Open VMware Workstation and click on the Create a New Virtual Machine button.

   

2. Select Custom and click on Next.

   

3. You will be asked to select the installation media. Select Use ISO Image and click on Browse to select the CachyOS ISO file you downloaded earlier.

   

4. You will now see Guest Operating System selection. Select Linux and Other Linux 6.x kernel (64-bit) as the version.

   

5. Enter a name for the virtual machine and specify the location where you want to store the virtual machine files.

   

6. Set the disk size to at least 32GB. You can allocate more if you have the space available. You can optionally choose to store the virtual disk as a single file or split into multiple files.

   

7. You will now see the summary of the virtual machine settings. Click on Customize Hardware to configure the hardware settings.

   

8. In the hardware settings, you can configure the number of processors, memory size, network adapter, and other hardware settings. Make sure to allocate at least 4GB of memory to the virtual machine. You can increase or decrease it according to your setup. For the processor count, set it to the number of physical cores in your machine.

   

9. Optionally you can enable Accelerate 3D graphics under the Display tab for better performance, make sure to allocate enough video memory for the virtual machine.

   

10. Click on Close to save the hardware settings. You will now see the summary of the virtual machine settings. Uncheck the Power on this virtual machine after creation option and click on Finish to create the virtual machine.

    WARNING

    Don’t forget to uncheck the Power on this virtual machine after creation option. We need to enable UEFI boot for CachyOS to boot correctly. If you powered on the virtual machine before enabling UEFI boot, you can power it off and then enable UEFI boot.

    

11. Now you will see the virtual machine created in VMware Workstation. Click on Edit virtual machine settings to configure the UEFI boot settings.

    

12. In the virtual machine settings, go to the Options tab and select UEFI under the Firmware type section in the Advanced settings. Click on Save to save the settings.

    

Installing CachyOS

1. Start the virtual machine by clicking on the Start up this guest operating system button.

   

2. Now you can follow the steps in the Installation Guide to install CachyOS on the virtual machine.

Optional Tweaks

Improving Performance

Checkout Arch Wiki Guide on VMware for optimizing VMware Workstation for better performance, Especially the System speedup tricks section and Performance tips section.