Virtualbox looking good

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:08:49 -0800

I blathered on a bit about VMWare a while back, and lots of people recommended VirtualBox. I'm trying VirtualBox 3.1.2 with Windows 7 host and Linux guest, and it works surprisingly well. I've used it successfully to hack on a bunch of projects while I'm stuck on a Windows laptop (shudder).

Installing was essentially self-explanatory. I never read any docs, except when it came to installing those "Guest Addition" programs to allow better mouse-handling. And I had to look up how to go about sharing folders between host and guest. But the documentation was clear, I found a short description how to set up the share and then and a command to run to mount the host folder:

sudo mount -t vboxsf ShareName /mnt/mountpoint

I'm using Gnome in my guest, because I haven't used it in a long time and I was curious what'd changed. I'm amazed even Compiz works in the guest. I recall a time in the very recent past when my computer couldn't even handle Compiz natively, let alone in a virtual machine.

Perhaps the best part about VirtualBox compared to VMWare is that there is one product called "VirtualBox" and one download link that took me a matter of seconds to find. Fancy the thought.

VMware: What's in a name?

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:05:01 -0800

VMware never ceases to confuse me. Not the program, which is a pretty good piece of software. Just the name of everything. Look at this list of VMware software; can you figure out what any of those things are via their names? The VMware official site is no less confusing.

Hilariously, all of these things seem to be named different things than a year or two ago when last I tried to install VMware. It seems this company, like many others, enjoys renaming everything at random, just to keep you on your toes.

If you search for vmware in Gentoo you get these results, among others:

app-emulation/vmware-dsp
app-emulation/vmware-gsx-console
app-emulation/vmware-modules
app-emulation/vmware-player
app-emulation/vmware-server
app-emulation/vmware-server-console
app-emulation/vmware-view-open-client
app-emulation/vmware-vix
app-emulation/vmware-workstation

The descriptions are wonderful:

Emulate a complete PC on your PC without the usual performance overhead of most emulators

In some cases, multiple packages have the exact same copy/pasted description, which is awesome. But maybe the Gentoo devs couldn't figure out what any of these things are either.

After some trial-and-error I narrowed it down to vmware-server, vmware-player and vmware-workstation. I think vmware-workstation is the non-free one, so that narrowed it down to the other two.

vmware-server required me to register at the VMware site and download something myself, after giving my name and shoe size and blood type to VMware and registering, then clicking a download link in an email. Then vmware-server installed via Portage OK. But it comes with a horrible web-only interface and the OS runs in a browser plugin. This crashed hard and often. I'd like a standalone client please.

There's vmware-server-console in Gentoo which sounds like it should let you connect to vmware-server, but ha ha, no, it doesn't. At least not the versions I ended up with via Portage. Then I read somewhere that you can't use VMware Server Console to connect to VMware Server 2.0, it only works with earlier versions. I think? I don't even know if this is true, all I know is vmware-server-console froze or crashed no matter what I tried.

I read on some random mailing list that you can use something called "VMware Infrastructure Client" to connect to VMware Server, but I couldn't for the life of me determine what this is or where to get it.

So I uninstalled vmware-server, made sure to rm -rf /etc/vmware /opt/vmware /var/lib/vmware first, and then installed vmware-player. This opened in a GTK2 GUI, which is what I wanted to begin with. But I couldn't create a new image. I could only open existing ones, which I could download from the official VMware site apparently.

Mind-bogglingly, an image in VMware isn't called an "image", it's called an "Appliance". Clearly someone in the marketroid department at VMware ran out of names, saw a toaster on the shelf and went with it. A washing machine is an appliance, not an OS image. Did you know the "Virtual Appliance Marketplace" has "Expanded Capabilities from the Largest Library of Applications for the Cloud"? Is there seriously someone in the world who can read this without needing to fight back a reflex to vomit? (Images are also referred to as "Solutions", to which I say only uggggggh.)

Anyways, it seems that they only added the ability to create your own images in VMware Player version 3.0; this feature was absent in previous versions. And 3.0 is not available through Gentoo yet.

So I uninstalled everything, rm -rfed any cruft I could find, and went and downloaded VMware Player 3.0 from the VMware site directly. I had to register AGAIN, but then I got it.

During the install, VMware Player 3.0 asks you for the location of your runlevels directory. It didn't accept /etc/runlevels on my box; I guess Gentoo's is non-standard. So I had to make a fake directory and go into it and mkdir rc0.d rc1.d rc2.d rc3.d rc4.d rc5.d rc6.d init.d and let VMware pretend that was my runlevels directory. All so the installer could spew an initscript into it, which doesn't even work. Oh well.

After trying to run vmplayer, failing because the kernel modules weren't loaded properly by the broken initscript, modprobeing the modules myself and restarting a bunch of times, then running vmware-networks --start manually, behold! I had a running VMware Player 3.0 and I made my own image and everything was good.

Are you confused yet? It's all free, so I guess I shouldn't complain. But I guess I just did complain anyways. Names don't have to be this confusing. So many companies do this, and why?

How about "light" (or even "lite"), "trial", "full", "free", "paid", "server", "client"? Those are nice words. We all know what those words mean. "VMware ESXi" might sound EXTREME or trendy or whatever, and maybe it really does "Deliver Enterprise Performance to Your Applications" (ugggggggggggh), but what the hell is it? What is VMWare ThinApp? What does it do? How am I supposed to buy what you're selling when you're speaking a foreign language to me?

Gentoo VMWare Fail

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:59:55 -0700

According to this bug, VMWare on Gentoo is in a sorry state, with one lone person trying to keep it going. I can't get vmware-modules to compile on my system no matter what I try, which is depressing. Kudos to all of our one-man army Gentoo devs who are keeping various parts of the distro going, but I wonder how many other areas of Gentoo are largely unmaintained nowadays.

KVM was braindead simple to get set up in comparison with VMWare, but I can't get networking to work. This is because I'm an idiot when it comes to TUN/TAP and iptables. I've read wiki articles that suggest setting up my system to NAT-forward traffic into the VM but I couldn't get that working and don't have a lot of time to screw with it.

On one of the Gentoo mailing lists I noticed that a dev has posted some KVM images of Gentoo suitable for testing. But I'm looking to start up an image from scratch and that doesn't help, and it's not going to help me get networking going any easier.

Why do I feel like this'd take 10 minutes to set up on Ubuntu? Look at this, or search for "ubuntu vmware" and see the hundreds of results. Given that it's a VM and it doesn't really matter what the host OS is anyways, I'll probably do that on my laptop, but it's still depressing.

briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: VMWare)

Virtualbox looking good

VMware: What's in a name?

Gentoo VMWare Fail