The Art of Tech

After updating the system to a distribution using the 2.6 kernel (the original installation was on 2.4) I found a couple of small problems.

The first, which I do not believe is related to the kernel release, is that I could no longer use the virtual machine in full screen mode. I believe this is due to some small, subtle difference between XFree86 and the xorg X server.

The second problem, was getting the 2.6 kernel modules to build using VMware's vmware-config.pl script. I ended up hacking that script to just continue on when it thought it could not find the kernel headers even though it was looking right at them. It worked fine and built and installed the modules.

After some kernel update or another (I think it included a version bump and not just a release bump) under FC2, I started to experiece two other odd problems with the VMware drivers. The first occured if I did not shut down the VMware services manually before shutting the system down; it would hang waiting for one (did not matter which) of the vmnet interfaces to stop being "in use" which meant an inifite loop. The other was that many times, I would have to rebuild the drivers each time I booted the system. After doing so, VMware ran just find (other than the fullscreen thing.

Since this new notebook was going to dual boot (due to the better video support) I did not bother to bring the WinXP VM over yet, so I did not originally install VMware Workstation 4.0.5 (or 4.5.x). At the end of last week, I decided to get it set up. However, I decided to try out the new VMware Workstation 5 beta (it was at RC2 at the time I pulled it down) and see if it fixed my problems.

Sure enough, I do not have to futz with the drivers anymore and they do not hang the system on shutdown. Woot. I have not actually installed any guest OS's yet (I will copy the VMware 4.0.5 WinXP VM over from the old notebook sometime this week and try out the conversion tools), but I plan to install both RHEL4 & CentOS4 VMs to play around with.

Over the weekend, they released VMware Workstation 5 RC3, which I have downloaded and installed. The first difference I noticed was that the UI had seen some significant redesign in some places.

Installation has been very smooth and easy to accomplish (no more hacking vmware-config.pl). The new "Teams" feature looks very interesting and (probably) will be quite useful to me. The new 64bit support is another item that I plan to test, soon.