hrm. occasionally since i’ve upgraded to 8.04 final, i’ve noticed that i completely lose ctrl, alt, or shift…. it’s really hard to use a linux system when you can’t use those modifiers. i started paying a little more attention when it would happen and i only ever lost those keys after vmware had been running for a little bit.

i updated vmware-run-any-update from v115 to v116 (here) and things are looking a little better. i think all the sysctl.conf changes i made for vmware were lost when i upgraded…. since ubuntu 8.04 is running 2.6.24 w/ the new schedulers i haven’t really had to go back and re-tweak the vmware settings anyhow.

i’m still fighting the urge to install firefox 2 so i don’t have to use firefox 3 beta 5…. it sucks not having my old add-ons… and wierd script errors are plaguing a few sites.

boo. after rebuilding my kernel/modules vmware-config.pl doesn’t want to compile vmmon on 2.6.24.

Building the vmmon module.

Building for VMware Workstation 6.0.0.
Using 2.6.x kernel build system.
make: Entering directory `/tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only’
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.24/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.24′
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/linux/driverLog.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/linux/hostif.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/common/comport.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/common/cpuid.o
In file included from include/asm/bitops.h:2,
from /tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/./include/vcpuset.h:74,
from /tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/./include/modulecall.h:23,
from /tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/common/vmx86.h:19,
from /tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/common/hostif.h:18,
from /tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/common/cpuid.c:15:
include/asm/bitops_32.h:9:2: error: #error only <linux/bitops.h> can be included directly
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config2/vmmon-only/common/cpuid.o] Error 1

i found a how-to to modify the vmware-any-any-update115 so that vmmon would compile. [here] vmware is working under 2.6.24! woot woot.

never got around to posting this. rather than clean it up, i’m posting as is.

i’m currently using vmware player to run a virtualized winxp under ubuntu on my dell latitiude d620. i’ve tried to migrate as much crap off my winxp install that i can but i still have a vmware image file that is almost 10gb. i really want a 2gb winxp image so it’s a lot easier to maintain.

i’m also not sure if i want to use vmware player, qemu, or virtualbox. over at the ubuntu forums, out of 242 votes virtualbox has over 50% of the votes. hrm, i guess i’ll try virtual box then.

ubuntu virtualization poll
VMware		80	33.06%
VirtualBox		130	53.72%
QEMU		32	13.22%

ubuntu virtualization links:
http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=17531
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsXPUnderQemuHowTo
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SeamlessVirtualization
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wine
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoftwareEquivalents
http://www.osalt.com/

p.s. i’ve gotten my vmware image down to 6gb, but i really need to create another vmdk vmware image ( shooting for something that can be burnt on a dvd so ~ 4gb ) and use g4l to copy my current vmware image to the newly created image. shrinking a vmware image isn’t as easy as you think it would be… sdelete & JkDefrag are helpful utils you’ll need to help you shrink a vmdk image.