Triangle Open Source Lab

last modified 2009-06-02 jr

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I have been hacking around with Linux for around nine or ten years now and I prefer Linux over the commercially available operating systems. My wife on the other hand had never used Linux, so we always had XP on one of the computers. She mostly surfs the net and plays solitare and the like, so I was thinking that it would be easy just to back up her personal documents and load Ubuntu... Then I remembered the one app that she has to have over anything else, Photoshop. Yes, I could have forced the GIMP issue, but in retrospect, who wants a divorce over a computer program?

How to make this work was all but simple. I realized that virtualization would work, but I had to find a virtualization engine that would be easy for my wife to deal with. I did some research and found VMware Server was free. Using VMware production products in the past I realized that this would be feasible for the wife.

Setting up VMware Server wasn't to hard after the first several failed attempts. First, install the dependencies (this is on Fiesty) from terminal:

aptitude install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

aptitude install xinetd

Download Vmware server from http://www.vmware.com/download/server/ grabbing the tar.gz file. You can use wget and the download location to download the file via command line, i.e.:

wget http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmserver/VMware-server-1.0.2-39867.tar.gz (downloads server.)

wget http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmserver/VMware-mui-1.0.2-39867.tar.gz (downloads management interface)

*** To get this to work right in Feisty you also need to download a patch from http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/vmware-any-any-update109.tar.gz

Start the installation by Untarring the package:

tar -xzf /Path/To/VMware-server-1.0.3-xxx.tar.gz

Change to the installation directory:

cd vmware-server-distrib

invoke the installer:

sudo vmware-install.pl

Choose defaults until you see:

Before running VMware Server for the first time, you need to configure it by invoking the following command: "/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl". Do you want this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]

type in NO and untar the patch:

tar xvzf /Path/To/vmware-any-any-update109.tar.gz

enter the patch directory

cd vmware-any-any-update109

Invoke the patch:

sudo ./runme.pl

The patch should finalize asking you if you would like to run vmware-config.pl, choose yes, but if it forgets, you can invoke that from the command line:

sudo vmware-config.pl

I selected defaults for everything, but if you need specific network settings, have at it.

To invoke Vmware, type vmware and you are off. A wizard should guide you through setting up your first VM and then you can install whatever software you need. Don't forget to install Vmware tools once you load up your VM.

Upkeep of Vmware:

After a kernel upgrade VMWare wont start because it has not been configured to the kernel

in terminal:

sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

If that fails at cannot find /usr/src/kernel/include and will not continue the install, execute in terminal:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

Then sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

VMWare should now work well for the you. If you are using Windows as a guest OS, you can set us Samba for file sharing (yes, I had to set this up for the wife to, as GIMP handles some editing tasks better than Photo Shop.)