Dual boot XP and Kubuntu?

[dibl]

Right -- works with Win 7 the same:



I don't see a problem with Control Panel, unless you try to mess with hardware (which is just virtual pieces, after all).

[SteveRiley]

Finally got it sorted. Didn't even need to go the long route of booting into recovery, according to the steps here. I simply started the Windows 7 VM in Virtual Box and then made the indicated registry change. Go to:

HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LSI_SAS

and change Start to 0 (zero).

Then I went back to first method, using VBoxManage:

vboxmanage clonehd "Windows 7 Ultimate.vdi" "Windows 7 Ultimate.vmdk" --format vmdk

This took a little while.

Finally, I created a new virtual machine in VMware Player. When prompted for where to install the operating system from, I selected the "install later" choice. I followed the prompts to configure the virtual machine. I selected "single file" for the VMDK and configured the other settings to closely match the VDI. Once that finished, I copied the converted VMDK file over the "empty" one that VMware Player created. I booted the VM, and no blue screen!

It went through a couple rounds of driver installations and reboots. Then I installed VMware tools. Everything looks fine, except Aero isn't working.

[SteveRiley]

Ah, turns out that VMware's Unity feature disables Aero anyway, so I'm not going to spend any more time on this. In general, although there appear to be fewer knobs and dials to twiddle with VMware player, it feels better integrated with the host OS than VirtualBox.

[GreyGeek]

Ah, turns out that VMware's Unity feature disables Aero.....

Isn't Aero the accelerated part of Windows video? If so, that would make sense, because you'd have to accelerated video drivers conflicting over screen real estate.

[SteveRiley]

Isn't Aero the accelerated part of Windows video? If so, that would make sense, because you'd have to accelerated video drivers conflicting over screen real estate.

When not in Unity mode, VMware Player does support Aero and desktop composition. I've actually seen it before. I suspect there's something lingering from the VirtualBox-to-VMware conversion. I don't need Aero bad enough to reinstall my entire Windows VM, though. So I'll live with it as is.

[dibl]

I wasn't impressed that Unity could do anything for me, since I only need Windows for a couple of proprietary genealogy apps. My real video card is a very nice Nvidia GTX-480, but of course that's not what VMware provides to Windows. Windows sees a "VMware SVGA 3D (MS Corp. WDDM)", which is not exactly a fireball but it does allow Aero if you want it. I was forced to adopt VirtualBox last year for some months, when the sid base dropped the "Big Kernel Lock" and there was quite a lag until VMware Player got a patch that let it build the modules. Although I was able to install and run my Win 7 OS on VBox fully satisfactorily, I was stung by the WGA thing, because I had previously registered Win 7 from the VMware Player installation. (I could not get VBox to convert the .vmdk to a VBox VM -- wasted a lot of time on that little project). So I had to learn how to get 120 days Win 7 "evaluation" time by re-setting the 30 days timeout 3 times. Happily a VMware patch came along in time to prevent a reinstallation. I did not find VBox as easy to configure, I don't remember if I ever got bridged networking to work with Samba (networking to the Linux filesystem) like it does with VMware, and its video interface seems less integrated with the KDE environment. So I'm very happy to be back on VMware Player.

[SteveRiley]

Today's Precise kernel upgrade mildly borked VMware Player. When I rebooted, I noticed that several of the player's drivers failed to load. When I executed vmplayer in a console, a dialog box informed me that it was time to recompile those modules. After that, the player runs fine again.

Is this expected behavior for VMware Player? Not that I mind, just curious whether I've uncovered anything unusual.

[SecretCode]

When I last used vmware it needed recompiling under all sorts of conditions. I would say that's normal.

[dibl]

Is this expected behavior for VMware Player?

Yes. Same as other proprietary packages that address your hardware directly (e.g. video drivers), the applicable kernel modules must be compiled against the booted kernel. So new kernel = new module compilation. For this reason, if your Linux distribution does not automatically install the kernel-headers and build-essential packages, you need to install them before trying to run VMware or after a new kernel is installed and booted.

This is the process that fails when VMware's design falls behind Linux kernel development too far -- that's why we need the patches referenced above.

[SecretCode]

Do you have dkms installed? That's supposed to avoid the situation the dibl describes (although iirc it didn't help as much with vmware as it does with nvidia and virtualbox, the other modules I have that seem to benefit from it).

[dibl]

This is a Debian system, however FYI:

root@imerabox:/home/don# apt-cache policy dkms
dkms:
  Installed: 2.2.0.3-1
  Candidate: 2.2.0.3-1
  Version table:
 *** 2.2.0.3-1 0
        500 http://cdn.debian.net/debian/ sid/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

I would expect the same result on Kubuntu.

DKMS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic...Module_Support

Probably a better computer engineer than me could figure out how to implement module-assistant to build the VMware kernel modules for new kernels. I have module-assistant installed and it does automatically build my Nvidia driver module for each new kernel. Hmmmm, let's see if I can figure it out by comparison .....

EDIT: It works for Nvidia because Debian provides the nvidia-kernel-source package. No such package for VMware -- would have to do that work first before module-assistant's automated build feature could be implemented. Sigh.

[GreyGeek]

.....
I would expect the same result on Kubuntu.
....

I am running the dkms modules, which were installed by VB when I first installed it on this Precise installation. Since then, no kernel update has triggered a recompile of VB. When I upgraded VB that did trigger a recompile. Yesterday's kernel upgrade did not trigger a recompile.

[SteveRiley]

When I was running VirtualBox, DKMS was indeed installed. And after each kernel upgrade, DKMS would do its thing, and automatically recompile all necessary modules. Very nice. I like automation

However, after I switched to VMware Player and purged VirtualBox, apt-get autoremove wiped out DKMS, which indicates that VMware is not compiled to use it. It's only a minor inconvenience, true. But it is curious to note that Oracle's support for Linux plumbing (DKMS, VM settings, storage drivers that are aware of SSDs, and such) exceeds that of VMware, but it falls short of VMware for integration with Linux desktops.

[Guest]

Win8

P.S. -- I am also going to try importing my Win8 guest OS as well as my XP guest OS. And, since this box is dual booted with Win7 I may try to import my physical win7 installation into VMware as a guest OS. Wouldn't that be the cat's meow! Running XP, Win7 and Win8 apps from the Linux desktop simultaneously!

Where'd you get Win8 at? Please tell me. I am really looking for it.

[SteveRiley]

Where'd you get Win8 at? Please tell me. I am really looking for it.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview