intertwingly

Norman Walsh: In case you haven’t found it yet, here’s a pointer to the instructions for building VMWare Tools under Ubuntu 8.04, “Hardy Heron”.

It turns out that IBM Ubuntu software layer (e.g. VPN software) does not yet work with Hardy Heron.  A few years ago, I would compiling and comparing notes with collegues, but now I’ve gotten complacent.  I mean, really, Hardy has been out for 11 days now, what’s the problem?

So, I decided to try VMWare Workstation (i.e., for Windows).  The above instructions (originally for VMWare Fusion) also work for VMWare Workstation.  Suspend/Resume work, but unless Ubuntu is separately suspended, it won’t re-synchronize with the hardware clock on resume, but the following in crontab for root addresses this:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh start  > /dev/null

The VM runs above the Wifi layer (i.e., appears to the VM as eth0), but below the VPN layer (drats!).

On a T61p, the display runs about as well as the native open source video driver (i.e., no compiz).  One idiosyncrasy I’ve found so far is that releasing the right mouse button often has the effect of selecting the first menu item.

Switching back and forth between operating systems is fast, and one can even share directories (e.g. C:\cygwin\home\rubys as /mnt/hgfs/rubys) and copy/paste between host and VM windows.