Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

linux

VMware Workstation & Ubuntu ctrl-alt-ins not working?

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I just noticed that when running a VM on VMware Workstation 6.5 and Ubuntu 8.10(but this problem probably also occurs on other non-Windows OS’es), you can’t use the arrow keys. But also ctrl-alt-ins isn’t working, which is annoying cause you would have to do it with the mouse. And no arrow keys also means that you can’t browse through your command-line history in Windows or Linux for that matter. Luckily there are two work arounds:

  1. sudo gedit /etc/vmware/config
  3. If that doesn’t work try adding the following:
    xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
    xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
    xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
    xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
    xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
    xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
    xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
    xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
    xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
    xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
    xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
    xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
    xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
    xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
    xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
    xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
    xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
    xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
    xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Thanks goes out to AlexPX and Johannes for pointing us out to this solution. There’s also a KB article on this one I just noticed.

VMware Workstation 6.5 and OVF

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I was looking into converting the VIMA appliance from OVF to a regular VM. I wanted to run VIMA directly from VMware Workstation. For the windows version of VMware Workstation there’s a conversion tool, and Arne of ICT-Freak wrote a nice howto. (Although it’s in Dutch you will figure it out cause of the large amount of screenshots!)

But I’m using VMware Workstation 6.5 on Ubuntu and it doesn’t contain the conversion features unfortunately. But luckily a beta version of VMware Converter has just been released, 4.0. As of this version VMware Converter is also available for Linux. And you can see where I’m going… You can use VMware Converter for converting .OVF appliances to VMware Workstation:

  1. Download VMware Converter
  2. Install it by unzipping the tar.gz file and running “./vmware-install.pl”
  3. Next, Next, Finish
  4. Start VMware Converter
  5. File, New, Convert Machine
  6. Source Type: Virtual Appliance
    And browse to the .OVF file
  7. Destination Type: VMware Workstation
    And pick a destination directory
  8. Next, Next Finish!

I think it’s great that more and more tools are available for Linux!

Ubuntu 32bit and 4GB of memory

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For a 32bit OS you can theoretically address 4GB of memory, but when running a 4GB system with a 32bit OS hit you’ll probably hit a barrier around roughly 3GB. For Windows XP there’s no way of solving this unfortunately as far as I know, which is a shame cause 800MB was not being utilised. For Ubuntu there is, my former colleague Patrick pointed me out to this and it works great, thanks again for me helping me:

sudo apt-get install linux-server linux-headers-server

So what it does is installing the Ubuntu server kernel which includes PAE support. PAE stands for Physical Address Extension and it increases the address size from 32bits to 36bits which means you can address up til 64GB. For more info on PAE read this wiki.

Windows is “gone”…

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As some of you know, I’ve upgraded my home pc to Ubuntu 8.10. It’s doing what it should do, and probably better than it did with Windows Vista. Now I’ve also upgraded my company laptop from Windows XP to Ubuntu. My laptop crashed for the second time in 3 months, some weird registry corruption… I was really sick of it, so I wiped it completely, installed Ubuntu and a whole bunch of cool apps.

At VMware we’ve got a company virtual machine which holds all the company apps one would need so I installed VMware workstation. Added a second disk to the VM for my documents, which also makes it easy to backup my documents every once in a while!

Thanks Ubuntu, and if you’ve never looked into Ubuntu, download the live CD and just try it out. It’s free, and easy to setup… it’s a live CD so you don’t need to wipe your system to actually try it!

Installing VMware Workstation 6.5 in Ubuntu…

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I just downloaded the .bundle file for my Ubuntu 8.10 Workstation at home. So what to do next? I’ve been using Debian and Ubuntu off and on for a while so I’m used to “apt-get install”. But this is a .bundle file, so no apt-get for this application. Well the answer was really simple just run the bundle file:

  • sudo sh VMware-Workstation-6.5.0-118166.i386.bundle
So far I really like Ubuntu 8.10! It seems to do everything it needs to do straight out ot the box! By the way, Sven Warren wrote an extensive howto for installing WS6.5 on Ubuntu. It would be nice if VMware would create a debian repository for this download so we can update it with apt-get…