Munckfish.net

I’ve wanted to make a note about this for a while. Seems ubuntu_demon (one of the ubuntu forum moderators) has collected together some interesting links on the subject here: Some interesting (ex-?) Mac users are switching to Ubuntu(3).

One Mac guy I noticed make the move is Mark Pilgrim. See When the bough breaks and Essentials, 2006 edition. Mark is the author of the excellent Python book Dive Into Python.

Note that if you need to uninstall VMWare Player (if you installed it from the Ubuntu repositories) you must select “Mark for Complete Removal” in Synaptic otherwise the vmware init scripts won’t get removed and the init process will logging errors (not fatal though) at startup. I think this is bug, I should probably raise it in launchpad.

Update: make sure your also completely remove the /etc/vmware directory and all files beneath it as well. The player uninstall process leaves this directory intact with the ‘locations’ file in it. When I tried to install VMWare Server it spotted that these files existed and though that it was already installed.

I know I’m probably a bit behind the times on this one, but I’ll make a note of it anyway. VMWare seem to have decided to make their VMWare Server product free. A few months back it was only the Player tool which was free and in order to use that you had to make use of pre-created virtual appliances.

However, the Server product does allow appliance creation so users can potentially install any OS they like (as long as it’s supported). This is great for me as I have been running Ubuntu as my main OS since it was released (June 2006) and although I could reboot into XP for Windows stuff it’s hassle and interrupts my productivety.

There’s a howto on the Ubuntu forum here: HowTo: Windows (XP) on Ubuntu with VMWare Server, and there are a selection of VMWare related articles on the Ubuntu Wiki. These ones seem the most relevant: VmwareServer, VMware Guide: Installing VMware Server on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS amd64.

The only downside at the moment compared to VMWare Player is that the Ubuntu repositories don’t seem to have Server packages available only the Player is included in the non-free section. So manual install for the moment. Lets hope .deb packages can be included into the repo soon.

One other thing to note. Before I upgraded to Dapper I was running VMWare player using bridged networking on Breezy. I was also using NetworkManager. I had a weird problem which I never got to the bottom of where bringing network interfaces up and down in NetworkManager would intermittently hang the system. I found a thread on the NetworkManager mailing list which seems to indicate I may have been suffering from a nic driver/vmware incompatibility, the solution to which was to upgrade the driver software. I’m hoping this issue has gone away in Dapper but I’ll need to prove that after I’ve installed VMWare Server.