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:
Unable to make a vsock module that can be loaded in the running kernel:
insmod: error inserting '/tmp/vmware-config0/vsock.o': -1 Unknown symbol in module
... you can follow the instructions in this blog post to get it compiled and loaded into you kernel.
