Preparing IDE and development environment for Zenoss - part1

Finding a good IDE for Zenoss development can sometimes be tricky. Most people resort to use ssh and vim to do the job. Although I like vim a lot, however, it is not the editor of my choice for big jobs. I find a balance of mouse and keyboard short-cuts easier and quicker to use. This is the first part which discusses preparing a VM Dev environment. In part2 I will cover the actual IDE setup.

1- Download the latest VMWare Image from http://community.zenoss.org/docs/DOC-3240?noregister. I am using 32bit 3.1.0 at the time of writing this.
2- I prefer VBox instead of VMWare, so extracted the image, imported in VBox 4.0.12 and added it as a Red Hat Linux guest loading the VMWare harddrive. Then changed the advanced setting of Network interface to use Intel 1000 MT Desktop network adapter instead of PCnet. If you don't do this, your network interface won't come up after boot. After boot login username:root password: zenoss. Remove vmware tools by running vmware-uninstall-tools.pl. Note this step won't be needed if you want to use VMWare. In that case, you just need to run the image and login.
3- Assuming your network works with Internet then run yum groupinstall gnome-desktop
4- Run yum install setuptool system-config-display system-config-network system-config-services system-config-securitylevel gcc make
5- run passwd zenoss to set a password for zenoss user I have put the default 'zenoss'
6- run system-config-display to create initial X config
7- run system-config-securitylevel-tui and then disable SELinux
8- From Vbox menu select install guest additions, this will mount Guest ISO Virtual CD
9- run mount /dev/cdrom /media to mount guest additions
10- Now logout from root and log back in with zenoss user and the password you set
11- run startx, this should bring full gnome desktop which will be in low resolution
12- Open a terminal shell and run following command in it:

[zenoss@localhost ~]$ su - --session-command=/media
                                     /VBOXADDITIONS_4.0.12/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

This should build whole guest additions successfully. As mentioned if you decided to go with VMWare you won't need to do this step and step 9. I haven't tested that scenario though. After installation you will need to reboot.
13- Login with zenoss user and run startx, now you should have a full blown gnome desktop with all guest VM bells and whistles including shared folders and copy paste.

I personally use a shared folder for project development as I can access source code both from VM and Host OS. To do that you might want to take a look at my older post virtualbox-and-guest-ubuntu-shared

This will continue in part 2...