Install CentOS 8 on VMware Fusion 11.5 Error - Pane is Dead

Problem:

Installing CentOS 8 on VMware Fusion 11.5 produces an error.

“Pane is dead” appears at the bottom of the screen. Rebooting doesn’t make the problem go away.

Solution:

The easiest solution I can find is to conduct a custom install selecting Red Hat 8 as the OS and set the BIOS type to UEFI. When the virtual machine boots, attach the CentOS 8 .iso file, reboot, and continue the install as normal.

Root Cause:

As best I can figure it, the root cause seems to be tied to how Fusion identifies CentOS 8. Fusion appears to identify it as “CentOS 5 or earlier 64-bit” which has either hardware settings, drivers, or both, that are incompatible with the CentOS 8 installer.

Edit:

While I used UEFI, the custom install option will also work with “Legacy BIOS” selected.

Installing Microsoft Visual Studio Code on CentOS 7

Microsoft has recently released several cross-platform tools for managing code and databases.  It's possible that these tools either would not have been developed previously, or would have been made available exclusively for Windows.  But as they say, the times are changing.  Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella has promised a new Microsoft, and here it is.

Visual Studio Code is a tool which represents this "new" Microsoft.  It's open source, it's free, and it can be used on Windows, MacOS, and Linux OSes.  Moreover, there is extensive context sensitive support of multiple programming languages - even non-MS languages.  VS Code is a very modern editor offering built-in support of get, modular extensions, and it also offers "IntelliSense," a feature that "provides smart completions based on variable types, function definitions, and imported modules."

Installation of VS code on Windows is pretty straight forward, so I decided to try the process on a recent distribution of CentOS 7.  Specifically, I used the CentOS OS below.

The installation Instructions for Fedora and RHEL variants can be found here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux#_rhel-fedora-and-centos-based-distributions

Step 1. Install the correct keys for the MS repo

Step 2.  Install VS Code.  Answer "y" if there are needed dependencies.

That's it!  VS Code is ready to execute.  It is not recommended to run VS Code with elevated permissions, so sudo is not needed.  Once running, you may discover that you need to also install Git if it isn't already installed.