萬法唯心 - Impermanence

Last week, I decided to install VMware to run Linux (Ubuntu) and Vista on the computer at work. The process was quite simple, installed VMWARE Workstation, configure the Virtual Machines that I want to create, load it up and start installing. After everything installed, I put the VM images on to my USB harddisk and took them home.

Everything ran ok with the VMware player under Windows which is quite impressive. I can still remember the time when I first formatted my computer to install Linux. But running Ubuntu on Linux is not what I really want, it make more sense to have Linux has the host since that’s the OS I use at home. However when I tried to play the images with the VMware player in Ubunt, it says that the version I’m using is older than the images :(. Still haven’t sort that out… but here is a screenshots in XP (with Vista theme)

I’m also quite impress with the computer at work, not top of the range, but it’s a dual core Athlon 3600+ with 2GB RAM, it can run Ubuntu on VMware faster than my laptop running it direct. When I tried to run both Vista and Ubuntu at the same time on my laptop under XP, I think it took at least 10mins to load up Vista! Just can’t handle it. When I did the screenshot, I had the Ubuntu displayed on my Laptop screen (1024×768) and Windows on the main monitor (1280×1024). Will be the other way round when I get the VMW player working under Linux. Would recommend VMware if you want to try Linux but can’t escape from Windows :D, but I think a dual core processor + 2GB RAM is the min requirement to have it running smoothly.

– Update –

Found out that the VMware player that is installed by aptitude is version 1, that means the installation will have to be done manually. Downloaded the latest version 2.0 from the VMware website, installed it following a few steps and got the VM Vista running on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Since the problem is solved, I used the workstation to install a XP. Did a update on Ubuntu, not very clever since that upgraded the Kernel to 2.6.20-16! Restarted and VMware player wouldn’t work anymore. If you have the same problem, just uninstall it by:

sudo ./vmware-uninstall.pl

and do the recompile/installation again since the kernel has been upgraded. However it didn’t went that smoothly for me, it gave me an error when I try to uninstall vmware:

Virtual ethernet failed

In my case, I need to disable the VMware Virtual Networking Driver with the Restricted Driver Manager, restart my comp and then run the installation or the reconfiguration tool: