I’m running ubuntu linux as my main OS with a windows XP VM for all those things I just have to have windows for (like writing plugins for a must have application). The problem I sometimes have with this is that disk accesss can be terrible from inside the VM, like cleaning up 20 odd Gb of data that were cluttering up the disk image – thankfully if you shut down the VM you are able to mount the disk image natively and perform operations on it.
sudo mkdir /mnt/winxp_one
sudo vmware-mount.pl /var/vm/WinXP_One/Windows\ XP\ Professional.vmdk 1 /mnt/winxp_one/
And then suddenly I can navigate my C drive from that mount point and delete that 20Gb of files in 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes like it would have been under windows.
[dev@stoner:/mnt/winxp_one/BDK] ls ../
AUTOEXEC.BAT CONFIG.SYS MSDOS.SYS pagefile.sys ruby
BDK Documents and Settings NTDETECT.COM PDOXUSRS.NET System Volume Information
boot.ini dump.txt ntldr Program Files temp
Config.Msi IO.SYS OT RECYCLER WINDOWS
[dev@stoner:/mnt/winxp_one/BDK]
However, I did have to manually kill the process after I had finished in order to release the lock on the vmdk file
[dev@stoner:/mnt] ps -e | grep vm
6121 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-bridge
6143 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-netifup
6144 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-netifup
6163 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-natd
6170 ? 00:00:49 vmware-serverd
6191 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-dhcpd
6192 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-dhcpd
8049 pts/2 00:00:00 vmware-mount.pl
8059 pts/2 00:00:04 vmware-loop
8060 pts/2 00:00:00 vmware-loop
[dev@stoner:/mnt] sudo kill -9 8049 8059 8060
I didn’t think it was going to be possible but this guy found a way for me to at least get the server console running so that I can connect to my machine at work!!
Basically the solution was to move vmware versions of libgcc and libpng out of the way
cd /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.org
cd ../libpng12.so.0
mv libpng12.so.0 libpng12.so.0.org
Was looking through the GUI options for a virtual machine I have and could not for the life of me figure out how to resize the hard disk. I originally thought that 10Gb would be sufficient for my windows image but that notion was quickly disabused after I’d installed Visual Studio and pulled down some data to work with. It would seem a fairly simple thing to do (memory and number of cpus allocated can be easily changed as long as the image is not currently running) but alas it would appear that you are stuck with what you originally budgeted for … if you are stuck in the GUI anyways.
The solution, as always involved a bit of command line magic. I store my images under /var/vm and the magic command was actually quite straight forward:
vmware-vdiskmanager -x 20GB /var/vm/WinXP/Windows\ XP\ Professional.vmdk
and voila after I’d restarted the vmware server console and rebooted the image there was 20Gb of space available!!! But wait…. the windows drive is only using 10Gb of it, how to get it using the whole thing. In the end our sysadmin came over with an Acronis Imager boot disk and we booted the image and quickly pulled up the boot ordering menu, selected “boot from cd” and then used the Acronis application for resizing a partition to use unallocated space. Reboot once more and then we were finally done!!
You’ve probably heard by now how M$ pulled an 11th hour turnaround on their plans to allow the virtualisation of Vista Home and Basic editions. This has been attributed by some to piracy fears but that doesn’t really sit right. The guys over at Ars Technica are sharp as always and point out that it probably has more to do with fears that Vista could be sold alongside Mac OS X on apple hardware and run as second fiddle to the apple OS.
Now imagine Apple running adverts on the TV that say: with a Mac, you can get the best of both worlds by adding Windows Vista to your Mac for $99. “Get a Mac, then add a PC for $99!”
All of this paints a picture in which Apple could use OEM pricing to offer Windows for its Macs at greatly reduced prices and running in a VM.
Now that sounds a bit more like why MS are shitting themselves. I saw my neighbour at uni running windows in a VMware session on his Fedora Core box and I have to say it was eerily good looking. Got kind of weird though when he downloaded and installed putty then ssh’d back to the box on which the VMware session was running… spooky!
