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Linux
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Thursday, 29 July 2010 08:39 |
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First of all, using a journaling filesystems like NTFS, ext4, XFS, or JFS (not to name all of them) is a very good idea and nowadays unthinkable not to do. Linux offers a good variety of different option as journaling filesystem for your system. Since years I am using SGI's XFS and I am pretty confident with stability, performance and liability of the system. In earlier years I had to struggle with incompatibilities between XFS and the boot loader. Using an ext2 formatted /boot solved this issue. But, wow, that is ages ago!
Lately, I had to setup a fresh Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) system for a change of our internal groupware / messaging system. Therefore, I fired up a new virtual machine with almost standard configuration in VMware Server and run through our network-based PXE boot and installation procedure. At a certain step in this process, Ubuntu asks you about the partitioning of your hard drive(s). Honestly, I have to say that only out of curiousity I sticked to the "default" suggestion and gave my faith and trust into the Ubuntu installation routine... Resulting to have an ext4 based root mount point ( / ). The rest of the installation went on without further concerns or worries.
Note:
I really can't remember why I chose to go away from my favourite...
Well, it should turn out to be the wrong decision after all.
Ok, let's continue the story about ext4 in a VMware based virtual machine. After some hours installing additional packages and configuring the new system using LDAP for general authentication and login, I had an "out-of-the-box" usable enterprise messaging system based on Zarafa 6.40 Community Edition inclusive proper SSL-based Webaccess interface and Z-Push extension for ActiveSync with my Nokia mobile. Straightforward and pretty nice for the time spent on the setup.
Having priority on other tasks I let the system just running and didn't pay any further attention at all. Until I run into an upgrade of "Mail for Exchange" on Symbian OS. My mobile did not bother me at all with the upgrade and everything went smooth, but trying to re-establish the ActiveSync connection to the Zarafa messaging system resulted in a frustating situation. So, I shifted my focus back to the Linux system and I was amazed to figure out that the root had been remounted readonly due to hard drive failures or at least ext4 reported errors.
Firing up Google only confirmed my concerns and it seems that using ext4 for VMware based virtual machines does not look like a stable and reliable candidate to me. You might consider reading those external resources:
ext4 fs corruption under VMWare Server 2.01
Bug #389555 - ext4 filesystem corruption
Well, I learned my lesson and ext{2|3|4} based filesystems are not going to be used on any of my Linux systems or customer installations in the future.
Addendum: I did not try this setup in other virtualization environments like VirtualBox, qemu, kvm, Xen, etc. |
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Linux
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Friday, 16 April 2010 09:24 |
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Summary of different problems while using VMware products on Ubuntu. This article is going to be updated from time to time with new information about running VMware products more or less smoothly on Ubuntu.
Following are links to existing articles:
VMware mouse grab/ungrab problem
(Source: LinuxInsight)
Upgrading GTK library in Ubuntu since Karmic Koala gives you a strange mouse behaviour. Even if you have "Grab when cursor enters window" option set, VMware won't grab your pointer when you move mouse into the VMware window. Also, if you use Ctrl-G to capture the pointer, VMware window will release it as soon as you move mouse around a little bit. Quite annoying behavior...
Fortunately, there's a simple workaround that can fix things until VMware resolves incompatibilities with the new GTK library. VMware Workstation ships with many standard libraries including libgtk, so the only thing you need to do is to force it to use it's own versions. The simplest way to do that is to add the following line to the end of the /etc/vmware/bootstrap configuration file and restart the Workstation.
export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK="force"
The interface will look slightly odd, because older version of GTK is being used, but at least it will work properly.
Note: After upgrading a new Linux kernel, it is necessary to compile the VMware modules, this requires to temporarily comment the export line in /etc/vmware/bootstrap. |
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Linux
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Friday, 19 March 2010 17:32 |
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Since quite some time Adobe Technologies released the Linux version of Adobe AIR to bring web applications and widgets to your desktop. Installing new applications on a Linux system is not always as easy as switching the computer on. The following instructions might be helpful to install Adobe AIR on any Linux system.
First of all, get the latest installer of Adobe AIR from http://get.adobe.com/air/ - as of writing this article the file name is AdobeAIRInstaller.bin. Save the download in your preferred folder.
Now, there are two ways to run the installer - visual style or console style.
Visual Installation
Launch your favorite or standard file manager like thunar or nautilus and browse to the folder where the AdobeAIRInstaller.bin has been saved.
- Right click on the file and choose 'Properties' in the context menu
- Set 'Execute' permissions and confirm modifications with OK
- Rename file into AdobeAIRInstaller
- Double click and follow the instructions
Using the console
The normal installer will open, install it. From now whenever you download a .air file, just double click it and it will be installed.
Troubleshooting
In case that the installation does not start properly, try to install via console. This gives you more details about the reasons. Should you run into something like this:
AdobeAIRInstaller.bin: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
Double check the execute permission of the installer file and try again.
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Linux
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Tuesday, 03 June 2008 16:16 |
After the last article about Running VMware Player on Linux I thought that it would be very nice to be able to create new and modify existing machines. Ergo, let's try the latest version of VMware Server on the same machine. Well, this installation doesn't need any modifications in source code but it is also not without pains.
The main difference for sure is that the VMware server runs as a service - well, actually it is invoked by xinetd - and can be administrated locally and remotely. But let's focus on the installation first. As mentioned we need xinetd on our system. This is done via apt, aptitude or any other APT install client that you prefer:
sudo apt-get install xinetd
After that we just run the standard procedure. Unpacking the archive and running the installation script like so:
tar xvzf VMware-server-1.0.6-91891.tar.gz
cd vmware-server-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
The installation process is nearly the same as for the VMware Player. Additionally you have to agree the EULA and enter the serial number for the server. The serial number is provided by the registration on VMware's website.
Alright, everything looks fine and we can try to fire up the VMware Server Console from the Applications :: System menu. In case that you don't get any reaction or feedback, open a terminal and run the command:
vmware
to see what's happening behind the scenes. I got several errors according to wrong version of gcc:
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
and therefore I did a short research on the web to find a nice solution:
cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
sudo mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.org
cd ../libpng12.so.0
sudo mv libpng12.so.0 libpng12.so.0.org
Attention: The destination paths on your system might vary depending on your entries during the installation procedure. Renaming the library files provides access to the existing library files of your Linux system.
After this little tweak I could run the VMware Server Console directly from the console and from the menu without any problems. Now, it is your time to enjoy and operate your virtual machines with VMware Server.
Sincerely, JoKi
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Linux
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Wednesday, 28 May 2008 11:21 |
A new article since a long time. Sorry, I was and still am very busy on my job but I need to write these lines first.
Since last month I modified my main development system a little bit and instead of running a native Windows operating system I gave xubuntu 7.10 a try. For developing purposes I installed VMware Player and therefore run virtual machines with Windows XP and Windows Vista. That's way more practical then a multiboot system. By the way, you can do this as well under Windows directly and use Microsoft Virtual PC instead of VMware, too.
As said, I started with xubuntu 7.10 and upgraded recently to 8.04 (Hardy Heron). Everything went smooth but VMware Player didn't start anymore. Fine, as VMware comes with predefined kernel modules which none of them fits for kernel version 2.6.24-16-generic you have to initiate the compile process yourself. No problem at all. Well, in general...
Sadly, the compile did not finish and interrupted with an error message according to a wrongly included header file. So, I looked around a bit and found a nice step-by-step guide on the VMware website to get it up and running. Here are the steps:
- cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
- cp vmmon.tar vmmon.tar.orig
- sudo tar xvf vmmon.tar
- cd vmmon-only/include/
- sudo nano vcpuset.h (or use any other editor you prefer)
- change line 74 from: #include “asm/bitops.h†to: #include “linux/bitops.hâ€
- rm vmmon.tar (return to the folder where you decompressed the tar file)
- sudo tar cvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only/
- sudo rm -rf vmmon-only/
- sudo vmware-config.pl
If you try to install a fresh tarball of VMware Player then the path to the vmmon.tar archive varies depending on your download.
- cd <path/to/your/dir>/vmware-player-distrib/lib/modules/source/
The modification is the same but the last steps differ:
- cd ../../../
- sudo ./vmware-install.pl
This process should work for VMware Server and Workstation as well.
And this morning I had to do the same steps again due to an 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' that installed a new kernel version 2.6.24-17-generic. So, after all and now that you know how to get your VMware Player to fly, it's not a big deal.
Sincerely, JoKi
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