5AM Ramblings

VMware and Linux

29 January 2009 | Jason

I installed VMware Workstation 6.5 with my new Windows 7 install in the hopes that I would still have linux on my machine somehow.  I gave up on OpenSUSE trying to work properly after a few weeks of trying to get everything working properly on my hardware and went back to Windows.  I should have tried to install again with a new properly burned install disk, but was too lazy.  VMware installed easily in Windows, and I started it up.  I got an install disk for OpenSUSE and installed that.  After installation and fiddling around a little, Yast would not open.  I tried installing again, this time from the net install disk.  It would not load the repositories.  Then I tried the DVD.  It installed fine but would not connect to the internet.  Confused, I wondered what was with my internet.  I had tried it both bridged and with NAT settings, but nothing.  I eventually installed XP and found out that internet was truly not working.  After a little searching on the internet, I found I needed to use internet connection sharing with the host only adaptor.  I did and success!  I had internet.  After much more fiddling, I still did not have everything to my liking.  With even more fiddling, fewer and fewer things worked the way I wanted them to.

I also eventually installed Ubuntu and Kubuntu because I wanted to see if I still hated it as much as I did previously.  For the most part, most things worked.  The main problem was that because it was set up so the Xorg server would determine the screen resolution, it would default to a quite small 640×480 screen.  VMware can resize its “screen size” so there is no actual default resolution that it will send other than a regular vga size screen.  At least this was easily fixed with RandR.  My next step was to install Debathena.  After all, this was the main reason I was willing to try Ubuntu again.  MIT SIPB all use Ubuntu and does not support the other distros very well.  On Ubuntu I ran into some troubles with it not resolving dependencies well, but for the most part it has worked on Kubuntu.  The last struggle I have is getting zephyr to work.  Currently it says it times out when trying to get a location.  Not sure what that means because a quick google search does not lead to any help about zephyr nor does the the documentation.  I have not tested that thoroughly yet, but most stuff seems to be working.

My problems include a variety of everything from general system lagginess (to be expected, but not this much) to sound skipping to everything still not working perfectly.  Overall on all of the systems, they’ve been slightly laggy when transitioning between my host OS and the guest OS, but once I’ve been inside the guest for a few seconds, the mouse works fine.  The keyboard lags and may occasionally drop keys or repeat one.  The sound has also been choppy on the systems.  I looked up suggestions to change sizes of some of the settings, but that didn’t help much.  My networking is still sometimes spotty and does not work as well as I would hope.  Maybe VMware will fix this in Windows 7 soon.

When emulating things, do not expect them to be as fast as they would be on their native hardware.  Be ready to wait in frustration.