VMWare Workstation, Hardy Heron, VMWare Tools

Norman Walsh: In case you haven’t found it yet, here’s a pointer to the instructions for building VMWare Tools under Ubuntu 8.04, “Hardy Heron”.

It turns out that IBM Ubuntu software layer (e.g. VPN software) does not yet work with Hardy Heron.  A few years ago, I would compiling and comparing notes with collegues, but now I’ve gotten complacent.  I mean, really, Hardy has been out for 11 days now, what’s the problem?

So, I decided to try VMWare Workstation (i.e., for Windows).  The above instructions (originally for VMWare Fusion) also work for VMWare Workstation.  Suspend/Resume work, but unless Ubuntu is separately suspended, it won’t re-synchronize with the hardware clock on resume, but the following in crontab for root addresses this:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh start  > /dev/null

The VM runs above the Wifi layer (i.e., appears to the VM as eth0), but below the VPN layer (drats!).

On a T61p, the display runs about as well as the native open source video driver (i.e., no compiz).  One idiosyncrasy I’ve found so far is that releasing the right mouse button often has the effect of selecting the first menu item.

Switching back and forth between operating systems is fast, and one can even share directories (e.g. C:\cygwin\home\rubys as /mnt/hgfs/rubys) and copy/paste between host and VM windows.

Sam,

Check your work email for a link that got me going.

thanks,
dims

Posted by Davanum Srinivas at
Thanks for the cron clock tip - the host-suspend-clock-lag in Ubuntu under VMware Fusion has been bothering me for ages, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it without using an NTP client in the VM.

Posted by Paul Annesley at
I actually got done building that thing earlier this morning.  Was a really useful article.

Posted by Bob Aman at

Another Ubuntu T61 question for you:

I have same rig and want to get dual monitor going (T61 screen + 22 inch flat panel). Have you had any luck with that? Ubuntu forums don’t look promising.

[link]

Mike

Posted by Mike Herrick at

Check your work email for a link that got me going.

For the benefit of other IBM’ers: hardy agnclient.

I have same rig and want to get dual monitor going

Probably not going to help you, but I simply connected my 22 inch monitor to a Mac Mini.  There are tools for sharing the keyboard and mouse, but I haven’t tried them yet.

Posted by Sam Ruby at

Using dogear - Good tip for next time. thx.

— dims

Posted by Davanum Srinivas at

Regarding what you said about the network interfaces, I would guess that VMware’s network interface really has very little to do with your physical wireless card, and is really just a tap-like device that is bridged to your “real” wireless network card. In practice, this should mean that you can configure the physical network in the host and run a VPN connection in the guest, or run the VPN in the host and have the host do NAT or just plain routing to get your guest talking over the VPN.

I’ve done this sort of trickery before where my host is Linux and my guest is Windows, but since your host is a Windows box I imagine this becomes trickier — I have no idea how to configure routing or NAT under Windows. If I recall correctly VMWare on Windows actually runs a mostly-standard dhcpd under the covers whose configuration file you can find and hack about with to get the VM to do weird things with routing, but you still need to find some way to convince your Windows system to actually be a router.

Posted by Martin Atkins at

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