The Fugue

I had a heck of a time getting VMWare Server running on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). The problem is that the vmmon and vmnet modules fail to build against kernel 2.6.24. A little googling quickly reveals that you want the any-any-update patch, but that didn't work for me either. To be specific, vmware-any-any-update117c.tar.gz did not work. It turns out vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz works great. Maybe 117 is for the 2.6.25 kernel or something.

So, you do the vmware installation except for the vmware-config.pl step. Then you download and extract the above tarball and run runme.pl. Simple enough.

But when you try to run it, you get errors like this:

/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)

I'm not sure what the right way to fix this is, but this way works for me.

sudo cp /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/

I was a beta tester for VMware Fusion. Fusion is a quality product, as I've come to expect from VMware. Unfortunately, the beta is over and a dialog box popped up when I tried to run it the other day. "The long wait is over!" Yeah, I've been waiting with bated breath for my beta to stop working until I fork over $40. You read my mind!

$60 ($40 after the current promotion) is the most affordable virtualization option for OS X right now, and in my opinion the most technically superior to boot. But I'm still a cheapskate, so I decided to use VMware Server on Linux over NX instead. NX is indistinguishable from magic. It works great, with one problem: the keyboard mapping in the virtual machine is completely skewampus.

In googling for the answer, I found a few people who had trouble with a key here or a key there. No, I had a completely unusable keyboard. e was the backspace key, backspace was a comma, escape was a letter, and everything else in between was equally unreasonable.

So I tried it over ssh (btw, it works a lot faster if you use ssh -Y instead of ssh -X), and it worked fine. So the gauntlet was down.

After some stabbing in the dark, reading, more stabbing in the dark, more reading, finally understanding, and one last stab in the dark, I got it to work. The theory is in this article. In short, VMware tries to map key codes to emulated PC scan codes (v-codes). If it can't do that, it maps keysym codes to v-codes. The former is apparently foolproof but isn't always an option. The problem here is that VMware thinks it will work, but it won't (probably because Apple's X11 isn't XFree86). So we simply need to put this in ~/.vmware/config:

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true

In the process of moving apartments, I decided to do a little rearranging of computers too. As part of that process, I decided to try and get rid of the dual boot by running Windows in virtual machine. Not long ago I had heard that VMware had a free product, so I went on over to their site and checked out VMware Server.

I ran the installation script in the tarball and answered a bazillion questions with the defaults (except I replaced /usr/bin with /usr/local/bin) and fired it up. This is one slick program. I installed Windows 2000 Professional and did the standard after-install stuff. (Firefox, Thunderbird, AVG free, Cygwin, 7-Zip) I can suspend and resume my windows box at will. I can run it full screen or in a window. Nothing is broken. I have a bridged network connection, no fancy networking tricks (although you do have that option). It's fast, completely usable (although it might not play bzflag well, of course). In short, it's like dual booting without the hassle. I highly recommend checking it out. It's also going to come in handy when I get a chance to repackage Csound for Debian, as a pure clean Debian sid VM.

Imagine my surprise when I read on LWN that VMware Server is a brand new free offering. Imagine that, I just tried it out at the perfect time to review it. So there you have it, my shining positive review.

Part of me is slightly guilty that I didn't even try Xen, but VMware has a reputation even among people like me who've never tried it, and I wanted to see for myself. Having been through the process of VMware, I must say Xen would have to be very much more polished indeed than it was when I saw it presented at PLUG to hold a pragmatic candle to VMware Server. But I do hope they keep at it.