Fedora17 on ESXi 5.x

Anyone who has loaded Fedora17 on a new VM in ESXi 5.x has seen this screen during the first boot:

Short version: there's a known bug with the fprintd package that ships with Fedora 17. If the VM you're using for Fedora doesn't have a USB controller added to it, fprintd will crash and halt your system.

You have two options to fix this problem; both are easy to implement. Before proceeding, decide if fprintd is something you can't live without.

If you can live without it, do this:

1. Restart the VM.
2. At the boot loader, select Advanced Options for Fedora Linux.
3. On the next screen, select the option with (recovery mode) at the end.
4. You'll see a system prompt with root@hostname; this is your recovery console.
5. Run this command: yum -y remove fprintd
6. When fprintd is gone, reboot the system.

Your VM will now boot without any complaints.

However, if you need fprintd, there's a fix for that, too. Remember that fprintd wants a USB controller at system startup. So give it one:

1. Right click your fedora VM and choose Edit Settings...
2. On the hardware tab, click Add...
3. Highlight USB controller and click Next.
4. Select the type of controller you want (if you're not sure, take the default).
5. Click Next to review your settings, then click Finish.
6. Click OK to commit the change.

Your VM now has a USB controller. Restart your VM, and fprintd will load properly, which means Fedora will load properly.