Comments on: The Linux Chronicles – Virtual Machines

By: Doug Weathers

Doug Weathers — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:43:05 +0000

Hi John,

Another VM choice is VirtualBox, the open source virtualization environment recently acquired by Sun. Still completely free (speech and beer) and runs beautifully on my Mac.

By: Frank

Frank — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:20:39 +0000

At John’s request, I’m adding some comments with my experience installing to Ubuntu Intrepid.

I am a novice. So it was challenging to me to get some things working. First thing I’ll put in here, If you are a little leery of working with tar.gz then you can use alien and convert .rpm to .deb and use the package manager to install. Package uses root by default to install.

Use the Package Manager to install alien or;

$ sudo apt-get install alien

$ cd ~/Desktop
$ sudo alien VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.i386.rpm

or the Server .rpm as appropriate. Then double click the .deb to install.

Several things I did. By default, Ubuntu sets your processor speed at
Powersave, if it’s scalable. On the top task panel, right click and add to panel the CPU monitor. Then click on it and set your CPU speed
to OnDemand at the least, Performance if you want. There may be
another way to do this, but I haven’t found it yet, I’m sure there is.

Next, I allowed the VM to have both processors. Set the memory at 1024 and turned it loose. Installed in less than an hour. Also, set the memory allocation to 1024, or less than your installed memory. Don’t use the max setting. On my box, it was more than I have installed and it screwed up the install at least twice.

I had a problem here, $ sudo chown jgd *. The log hasn’t been created yet and after the player installs it bitches about the log permissions not being correct.

I also had some problems with hibernating the first time. It couldn’t create and write to the snapshot file. So I just went back and did

$ cd “/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines”
$ sudo chown frank /Windows

Don’t get cutesy and go back in Nautilus and use properties/permissions to give root read and write privileges. Player can’t get exclusive lock on the files to run. (I know, I’m a nubey and didn’t know that.)

But I am thankful to John for posting this. I’ve been highly dissatisfied with the Wine solution. It won’t run most new iterations of Windows software.

By: Toby

Toby — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:29:12 +0000

There are a bunch of nice things about running stuff on a virtual machine instead of a real one. Got new hardware and don’t want to re-install all your applications? No problem, because you just move the virtual machine image over to the new box. Can’t get drivers for Windows 2000 to support the hardware of your new box? No problem, it doesn’t need them if you run it inside a virtual machine. Got a software vendor who won’t support their tiny application unless it’s on a “dedicated server”? No problem, give it its own VM and they’ll never know the difference. There is serious talk in the industry about running everything on a virtual machine in future, for a whole bunch of reasons like these.

The one issue we’ve experience with the “virtual hard drives only take up space on the physical hard drive when you write to them” trick is it’s kind of easy to run out of space on the real physical drive while the virtual drive still shows it has plenty left. Not too hard to watch for that when you’re in charge of both, but when you have groups of people who only have access to the virtual server over the network, it can get exciting. ;) I don’t know what VMware does in that case, but one of the other virtual server products we use just ‘pauses’ the affected virtual machine in that case. It’s either that or generate some kind of disk error to pass back to the operating system, I guess.