vmware3 tips and observations

Sean Welch welchsm at earthlink.net
Tue Sep 30 18:03:44 PDT 2003


I found the following characteristics of the current port (under
5.1 RELEASE).

The wizard does not work from the drop-down menu.  It is just a
shell script and the core dump is just from the bash.  The solution
is to run it directly.  ( /usr/local/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-wizard )

Win2k Pro will freeze during install.  The problem is somehow
related to the type of virtual disk you create.  When  I switched
to a vitual disk from the menu (in the wizard) labeled for NT the
OS installed without issue.  I actually changed all the names of 
the related files to what they were when I selected the Windows
2000 Professional option to create the disk and didn't have any
issues -- evidently the differences are purely in the actual virtual
disk(s).

Virtual machines with Quicktime installed run *significantly*
slower when the "web services" are enabled (little quicktime
icon in the system tray) -- turn it off and everything speeds up
wonderfully.

The vmmon_up module will unload just fine -- as long as you
haven't "powered up" a virtual machine.  It will refuse to unload
("in use") if you have "powered up" a virtual machine.  This 
appears to be harmless -- it will be force unloaded during 
shutdown.

The rtc module will panic the system when unloaded -- *if* 
used when the virtual machine is "powered up" with that 
module "attached."  If you want to use it anyway, hack up
the startup script ( /usr/local/etc/rc.d/rtc.sh ) so that it does
not have an argument for the "stop)" selection.  If you do this
the module will not be unloaded by the script when you shut-
down/reboot the real machine.  The disks will actually have a 
chance to sync before the kernel tries to force unload the 
module.  You'll still get a panic but it won't matter because
it doesn't touch your disk.

The lincense key can be entered to produce a license file from
the GUI menu.  As installed it will fail but if you copy the
license.ws.3.0 file to ~/.vmware that will be found and you 
can type in your key.  The GUI will do the hash calculation for
you.

You cannot install the vmware guest tools from the default
install (as far as I can tell).  The problem is that the iso image
files are not copied from to /usr/local/lib/vmware/lib directory.
I just did a make extract under /usr/ports/emulators/vmware3
and did a manual copy of that directory to the correct place.

Redhat 9 doesn't find the sound card on my machine.  Win98
and Win2kPro use it just fine.  I haven't figured this one out
yet.

Hope this helps some on this list!

                                                                    Sean




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