Installing CentOS 8 on VMware Workstation 15.5

It appears that the automated install of CentOS 8 does not work correctly in the latest version of VMware Workstation Pro 15.5 (15.5.0 build-14665864 at time of writing).

I’m not surprised considering it’s not even an option in the drop down but it’s good to know that there’s a workaround for this.

During an install , you will be prompted by the following error:

0016457: Pane is dead

The following problem occurred on line 31 of the kickstart file:

Section %packages does not end with a %end

Luckily, the workaround is simple. When you create your VM, select “I will install the operating system later.” You can configure the hardware and boot the machine for the first time. Afterwards, attach a optical drive with the CentOS 8 ISO and reboot. You can then go through the regular installer process.

The issue is logged as a bug on CentOS Bug Tracker though I’m guessing this is actually an issue with Workstation.

https://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=16457

Even more good news! CentOS 8 ships with a much, much more modern version of Git, 2.18.1 which released in September of 2018 (latest at time of writing is 2.23 which released mid August, 2019). You no longer have to download and build from source just to use HTTPS Git repos 🙂