Tag: VMWare Server

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OK, Here’s a weird thought…

Well, it’s a little bit weird and a little bit cool. Just another lil (seriously meaningless) VM game to take my mind off current events. You can move along now. Nothing going on here today but a lil bit of play time.

So, I have WinXPPro-64 running inside Ubuntu 8.04 using VMWare Server set up to use a bridged network connection so my network (as well as comps on the interweb) “sees” the VM as an entirely separate machine with its own IP address.

Well, that’s fun. I also have Win2K, Win98 and PCBSD virtual machines configured similarly inside the same host machine.

Soooo, how about accessing one of the VM clients from the host machine using VNC or Logmein or whatever? *lol* Kinda around the barn, eh? No real sense to it (and the lil Logmein utility doesn’t seem to like WINE all that much–maybe I ought to tweak my WINE config in the PCBSD machine), but it’s interesting. *heh*

Done.

OK, so Logmein is slow, what with all the refreshes and whatnot, but it does give me a little practice using it for folks who have trouble installing VNC for remote sessions. (Logmein doesn’t seem to think anyone but Windoze users would find their service useful…. and that’s probably pretty close to TRW) VNC’s a lil lot faster over the local network, of course (though remote computers don’t see any real speed/responsiveness benefit over Logmein), and for those times when I want to really access things here at twc central, that’s the key (really: using a keyfob USB drive with Portable VNC. Only ).

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VMs Under Ubuntu 8.04

After several weeks of trying out different distros of Linux (heck, different “flavored” distros of Ubuntu 8.04, for that matter) and four different OSes under two three different virtual machine schemas, here’s a waypoint.

Settled on plain vanilla Ubuntu 8.04 as my OS on this machine.*

Under all of the Linux distros, Virtualbox provided the slickest, easiest install and the best implementation of some things (sound) and spotty implementation of others (USB). Does NOT allow 64-bit client machines on a 64-bit host. That killed it for me.

VMWare Player? So-so ease of installation (some command line stuff but notaproblem). Extremely kludgy getting network functionality on clients. Way too many hoops to jump through and flaky networking when it did work. DOA.

VMWare Server. Ahhh. Screwed up, overly-complex installation procedure, but aside from some peripherals and such, almost all essentials work in client machines, certainly enough for almost all my needs in the various Windows client machines (for some of the remote computing tools suitable for some clients, for example, a Windows XP/2000/98 VM session works “good enough”). “Good enough” is good enough for now. Works fine testing new-to-me or upgraded Windows programs, Windows updates sees no difference to ordinary Windows machines, etc. It just (mostly–still would like sound) works. Do note that each of the VMs is allocated no more than 256MiB memory and all seem to run a lot snappier than any similarly-configured Windows system. Nice. Heck, I wouldn’t even attempt to install a typical WinXP (32) on a real machine with only 256MiB of RAM.

[Update–for whoever cares. *heh* I had a Q via email. No, I haven’t yet tried out Xen. Gimme some time, ‘K? And next time, feel free to use the comments section here to ask. 🙂 ]

Note: “[T]esting new-to-me or upgraded Windows programs… ” Tried out the updated a-squared anti-malware in a fully-licensed, full-featured installation in a WinXPP 64-bit VM and… if you’re one of the folks I sent a “here’s a freebie” email to, you might want to toss that freebie in the Recycle Bin. Crashes the VM every time it scans. Methinks it needs a bit of work before being ready for prime time. (Of course, it may also have something to do with the fact that the a-squared product is a 32-bit app, and M$’s WoW implementation of 32-bit apps in XP64 isn’t absolutely perfect, so it may still be fine for 32-bit Windows. I guess I’ll try it one another installation as well, then.)

Other freebies like this one (a nice standalone defragger) and this one (for CD Burning) have seemed to be fine, causing no problems and working well.

N.B. The CD-burning program, CDBurnerXP, requires the .NET framework be installed. No biggie. If you don’t already have it installed, the program will lead you through getting it when you invoke its installation routine.

For those of y’all running 64-bit OSes, I continue to like Opera browser. The 64-bit Internet Expploder 7 is really no improvement over IE7 32-bit; Forefox has too many extensions and plugins that aren’t 64-bit compatible to be competitive with Opera, either, IMO.

Of course, any more, since the primary face of any OS for me is the Web Browser (with email client a close second), having a stable, secure, capable browser that looks and acts the same (and has the same plugin/extension/widget behavior) in all OSes is a big plus for me. Hmmm… wonder what it’d take to install Mac OSX in a virtual machine? Never really thought about it since I don’t have an installation DVD for it sitting around and the thought of shelling out some $$ just to buy a copy and try to find out doesn’t appeal to me much. *heh*

Next? Need to see about installing a BSD in a VM. Just some more fun, cos I know NO ONE who’d need any help with something like PCBSD, the thing is so easy to install/use.

Time to stop rambling on? Mayb…

*“this machine”=AMD 2X64 5200+, 4GiB RAM, 400GiB primary hard drive, etc.

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Oh. Joy. *sigh*

Another silly puzzle that’s remotely Ubuntu-related: Sound in WinXP under VMWare Server.

So, all’s mostly well in Ubuntu 8.04. Graphics stable and as I want them. Check.

Sound. Check. (some rare niggling, inconsistent midi issues but not bad)

Video/play DVDs/CDs. Check.

All USB drives, peripherals, SD cards, etc., fully accessible, no problems. Check.

Flash player in browsers. Half a check. Have sound but not video. Weird. I’ll track it down eventually, but meanwhile YouTube and other vids play fine when downloaded (using a small python script) as flv files. [Seems the fix was locating and installing the not-well-advertised (as in “not at all”) Flash 10 Beta2 for Linux. Works like a charm now.]

Apps installed and working. Semi-check. Everything’s fine except for sound in Windows XP Pro64-bit running under VMWare Server 1.06 and two niggling problems remaining with Encore 4.2.1 running in Ubuntu under WINE.

The no sound in WinXP I can live with, more or less, until I can find a fix. It’s just an annoyance. The problems in Encore may drive me to set up a Windows-only machine just for Encore use. *sigh* Midi keyboard input for score transcription is almost as bad as the bad old days with early Finale score input, you know: “Play score, wait for note to show up. Go make a pot of coffee and a coffee cake. Call up friends to come over and help drink the coffee and eat the cake. Build ark. Load animals two-by-two. Go back and wait for notes played to show on score… ”

OK, not even the early versions of Finale running on a 286 were quite that bad, but sometimes it sure seemed like it. *heh* Encore, OTOH, has always–even in its early years, seemed much more responsive and fast. I may try a midi-to-USB cable and see if that helps.

The second Encore issue is more troubling. Sometimes files do not save. At all. Sometimes Encore tells me the file didn’t save but it did. Sometimes the files thus saved work when reopened and sometimes not.

Just sometimes. Not all the time. Can’t seem to duplicate a failure at will.

Strange. Thought at first of checking file/folder permissions. Nope. No common issue there. Cogitating on this one for a while…

But WinXP Pro running on just one CPU under VMWare Server? Muuuuch more responsive than under VirtualBox or VMWare Player. Very nice, even for WinXP. Even with only 256MiB of memory allocated for its use–an ammount I’d never recommend for normal XP machines. Of course, full screen mode sucks dead bunnies through a straw. Corrupted my nVidia driver and forced a reinstall of the nVidia driver. That’ll teach me. Did. Now I run XP in a lil 800X600 box inside my normal 1024X768 resolution. Still large enough to do good work on this 19″ screen. In fact, it’s what I’m using to write this post.