VMware WS 6.5 on Ubuntu 8.04 with ATI fglrx and Win95 guest keeps crashing

[Joep L. Blom]

Randall J. Parr schreef:
> I have (several) Ubuntu 8.04 systems with AMD 780G motherboard (Gigabyte 
> GA-MA78GM-S2H) with onboard ATI video.  The newest ATI Catalyst 8.9 
> fglrx X drivers are installed.
> 
> I have VMware workstation/vmplayer 6.5.0 118166.  I had installed VMware 
> 6.5.0 beta but then upgraded them to 118166.
> 
> I have a Win95 guest into which I have installed the VMware Tools from 
> 6.5.0 11816 which resulted in installation of VMware Tools 7.7.0 114891.
> 
> The Win95 guest keeps hanging/crashing.  Sometimes the crash just hangs 
> and the guest will no longer respond to keyboard/mouse input.  Sometimes 
> the crash freezes and/or takes the whole X down leaving a screen which 
> will not respond to keyboard/mouse or just a black screen.  When it 
> crashes the Win95 appears hung (won't respond to ping, etc.) the console 
> X may be frozen but the underlying host is still fine (can ssh to the 
> host and all the non-X stuff still running fine.)
> 
> This same guest can be run on an older Red Hat 8 machine with 
> workstation 6.0.x just fine. It's way slow but it doesn't crash.  It has 
> also been run on another workstation with Ubuntu 8.04 but an nVidia 
> video board.  It has not been run as extensively on these other 
> workstations but, to the extent it did run, it never crashed.
> 
> A purusal of the log files has not yielded much of use.  When it 
> hangs/crashes it does not seem to have time/ability to log the problem.  
> (Or maybe I'm not seeing something).
> 
> I believe there is some kind of problem/interaction between the ATI 
> fglrx driver and VMware video.  I believe this, in part, because the 
> problem was much, much more pronounced when running the original Ubuntu 
> 8.04 ATI fglrx based on Catalyst 8.3.  The problems got much better 
> after upgrading to the newest Catalyst.
> 
> 1) Is anyone else having problems like this?
> 
> 2) Any suggestions for settings in VMware/Win95 and/or X that might 
> alleviate these problems?
> 
> 3) Any suggestions for how best to isolate the problem.
> 
> Thanks.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  I am trying to help 
> someone turn half-dozen workstations inside-out; that is from Win95 
> machines running Cygwin X to Ubuntu machines running Win95 in VMplayer.
> 
> R.Parr, RHCE, Temporal Arts
> Portland, OR  U.S.A.
> 
> P.S. I also posted this in the VMware forums but thought it might be 
> more general fglrx and better posted here as well.
> 
I have worked with VMware with a lot of problems (AMD64, first with 
Fedora7 and now with Ubuntu hardy). I recently switched to VirtualBox, 
which is the Opensource counterpart of VMware and have had no problems.
VirtualBox can be downloaded with synaptic.
It may be worthwhile to try that before spending hours on VMware.
My 2 cts.
Joep