PHP is not Java!

I love Linux. But sometimes i must admit: Contemporary software is much easier to get to run under MS operating systems...

I just installed VMWare Server 2.0 on my machine. The initial install went quite ok. I was a little surprised when i found a Tomcat Server afterwards on my System (dont like Java) but obviously this is to run the VMWare Infrastructure Web Access (did i ask for this?). So i decided to open it. Unfortunately the Firefox on Ubuntu comes without a Java Plugin and the VMWare Infrastructrue Web Access seems to consist of a single Applet. If it is a java application anyway, why is it using a Web Server and a Java Applet then and not just run a Java GUI App? I dont want remote admin or any infrastructure things, i just want to run a vitrual machine!

After following countless forum posts and never finding the library files that i should copy from the JRE directories to Firefox' plugin directory, i finally installed the "Icedtea" Java variant that comes with a plugin for firefox. And finally this worked. The plugin does not display all applets (for example Jumploader.com does not work), but for VMWare it seemed ok. Speaking about Firefox: If your firefox always opens in a strange "Full-Screen-like" mode without buttons to minimize ect., this forum entry (Answer #8) might help. Just go to System->Preferences->Compiz Settings Manager->General Options (if using Compiz) and uncheck "Unredirect Fullscreen Windows".

Now i had the next problem: I configured my VMWare image with a static IP-Address and this would not match the bridged networking settings i had defined before. Therefore i wanted to change some interface definitions in the Virtual Machine- Unfortunately, the keymapping was somewhat screwed so that the cursor keys were not working in the VM. After some research i found out that there is a fix for that in the VMWare config file: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/177321  After playing around for 5 hours now, i am getting nearer to a running VM. Something that takes 5 minutes under Windows (even Vista...)

Update: Under new kernels, the current VMWare 2 release fails to build the vsock module. If you get an error message like:

... you can follow the instructions in this blog post to get it compiled and loaded into you kernel.

After working with Skype under Windows for quite some time, i did not want to miss it unser Linux also. So i decided to install it on my Ubuntu System at home.

Since it is a 64Bit System, the normal downloaded binary from skype.com did not work for me (wrong architecture: i386). Maybe there is some linux-savvy solution for this (dpkg --force-architecture -i skype...) but before i got to that i found that skype is available on the Mediabuntu repository. So after adding this repository to my system i could just do an

and it worked.

But then i could not get Sound to work. After some changes in the settings, eventually the playback worked but i still could not call anyone because they would not hear me. Google showed me a solution for this also:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4526841#post4526841

In this post, two options are shown:

load-module module-alsa-source device=dsnoop

or 

load-module module-alsa-source source_name=input

Both worked for me but with the first i had very low volume for my microphone. Maybe there is a way to tune this, but with the second option it worked so i used this (dont know what i am doing here but i dont want to digg deeper into Linux Audio setup). If you follow this please note that you can start/stop pulseaudio with:

/etc/init.d/pulseaudio stop

/etc/init.d/pulseaudio start

... no need for killall. Please make sure to also restart skype. And then in the options of Skype, set "skypein" as a Audio device for "Sound-in" and "skypeout" for "Sound-Out".

Now i can call people over skype again...

UPDATE: There is an official Skpye package now for ubuntu_am64 architecture. Please check the Comments to this for download location.