The Goldfish Chronicles

Been having some fun with VMWare, though not all that successfully.

It took only 2 tries to get SuSE happily running as a Guest on my XP laptop [the powerbook is now sulking]. There’s some oddness you have to do with X. VMWare claim you should install SuSE without the X server, but as this does not seem to work well with SuSE 8.2, I installed the whole thing, init’d down to runlevel 3 and ran the VMWare Tools ‘CD’ to install their X server.

Not that it matters. I’m running SuSE in 800×600 as the host OS can only manage 1024×768 on this laptop [Dell Inspiron 4150, Windows XP Pro].

One oddity. The keyboard seemed to be configured to be german. Quick hack of XF86Config fixed that. Since then, I’ve found another oddity. Shift-backspace restarts X. I keep doing this. It’s not funny. The only thing I can find out is that this can be due to a bad keyboard mapping. US-104 however seems to be the right one, so I can only guess this is a VMWare thing.

Since then, I’ve tried to install BeOS 5-PE under the SuSE Linux, FreeDOS, Solaris x86, ReactOS, MenuetOS and FreeBSD with no luck. It doesn’t help that I have no floppy drive in this laptop, so am making ample use of the virtual floppy facility, though I don’t think I can change floppies without restarting. MenuetOS is the only one I got to run, but the graphics driver was borked.

With the SuSE install, I’ve had no obvious luck with the copy+paste between machines and I’ve not managed to perform drag and drop either. I suspect this is all between Windows or something.

The mouse is quite interesting. Most of the time when it hits the edge of the guest screen it will switch to the host machine, but sometimes it seems to be stuck within the guest machine. No big problem as ‘ctrl-shift’ backs you out, but a bit odd.

I’m still not convinced. It’s a nice toy, and I’d love to have both OSes running at the same time, but it feels clunky. I’m going to see if I can start SMB so the XP box thinks it has a constant buddy, and see if I can put the laptop to sleep without confusing the Linux guest. If they work seamlessly, I can see a chance for vmware giving the Inspiron the clout to kick the Powerbook out of my laptop bag.

Neither XP or Linux can overwhelm OS X, even with their superior Java skills, but together I think they can do it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2004 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Family etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.