VMware Server on Gutsy ?

[John Carlyle-Clarke]

John French wrote:
> I have been trying to move off M$ to Ubuntu for quite a while, but have 
> been hung up by a must-have financial application for which there is no 
> Linux version. All my efforts to use Wine ran into the sand, but finally 
> I had the sense to try VMware Server on Feisty. And all was wonderful.
>
> So I was going through the process of moving, or replacing, all my 
> applications, and was 98% finished, when Gutsy day came along. 
> Obviously, it made sense to upgrade, and set up my new system on the 
> latest base. Disaster!  VMware refused to start Windows 2000 - something 
> like "a virtual machine power status problem". Since I couldn't get 
> around this, I tried reinstalling W2K, but it recreated the old system, 
> with the old error. So I decided to reinstall VMware Server. Uninstalled 
> fine, but no way to reinstall. VMware server has disappeared from 
> Add/Remove, and Synaptic.
>
> I had a look at the VMware site, and VMware Server is alive and well, so 
> why has Ubuntu dropped it?  I'll bet they have a reason. So what do I 
> do? Install it myself from a VMware download? Go back to Feisty? Use a 
> different approach? Advice, please.
>
> John French
>
>   
Agreed, for some reason it has disappeared from the repositories, but 
it's very easy to install from the VMWare site. 

If you already have a virtual machine created, you could download and 
install VMWare Player - the performance is better than Server, but you 
can't easily edit the virtual machines or create new ones (although you 
can adjust them by editing the vmx file, which is text).  I know the 
latest Player works fine on Gutsy, because I did it yesterday.  You will 
need to install the build-essentials package, and also the kernel 
headers as it has to compile some modules.  I assume VMWare Server will 
be just as easy, but I haven't tried it.

If it's easy enough for you to create a VM from scratch, you could give 
VirtualBox a spin too.  There are plenty of HowTo's available.  Windows 
guests generally won't seem to migrate from VMWare to VirtualBox without 
some significant problems, but when I tried it out, it seemed a lot 
faster.  There is an open source version available (which you have to 
compile I think) and a non-free but free for non-commercial use 
pre-packaged version.  It seems to have some nice features.  Setting up 
bridged networking is a little more tricky - NAT is the default out of 
the box.

John
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