Notice it starts out modestly with disk space requirements: 20GB. It’ll confirm that’s the ISO you want to work with, and identify that it’s OpenSUSE 64-bit: Now just drag and drop that into the target area on the VMWare Fusion window. Their estimate of 3.76 GB? A bit off, as you can see. You can also opt for a regular file download, of course, but it’ll be slower.įinally, the ISO image will finish downloading and you’re ready to proceed: It might take a bit longer for you, and if you’re at home, you might consider launching a VPN to mask the torrent traffic so your ISP doesn’t get confused and think you’re behaving in a nefarious manner. I like Transmission for the Mac and that 4GB download zipped along in well under five minutes: The fastest way to get it is through a Bittorrent client. If you’re on a slow network connection, you can choose Network Image, which is an incredibly small 125MB, but it’ll just be deferring all the additional data you need to download to get a full OpenSUSE up and running. I suggest “Leap” if you’re not a software developer since it has more end user programs: That’s at There you can get to the download page and decide which version of the system you need, and how big your install should be. Now open up a Web browser window and head over to the OpenSUSE site. Now in VMWare Fusion, choose File > New to create a new virtual machine. I am going to assume you already have VMWare Fusion installed and ready to go on your Mac too, if not, I’d suggest getting that all set up first. It all basically revolves around an ISO disk image that you’ll download from the OpenSUSE site to get started.

Makes things easier (though it’s not too bad if you have to start from scratch with a generic Linux 32-bit or 64-bit install).

In other words, you came to the right place! The good news is that there are about twenty different Linux distros that have already been profiled and optimized for the VMWare Fusion environment and OpenSUSE is one of ’em. I’ve been running Windows and Linux operating systems within my Mac system for years with excellent results. I’m also a big fan and longtime user of VMWare Fusion for the Mac. OpenSUSE, for example, is more popular in Europe than in the United States, which is too bad as it’s a solid option.

Called “distros” (distributions) or “flavors”, there are at least a dozen significantly different Linux options that are popular for specific audiences or in certain geographic regions. If you’re coming from the world of MacOS X or Windows, you are in for quite a shock when you realize just how many different versions of Linux are available.

Install linux on mac in vm