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John French wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:471B2442.5020501@tow.org.uk" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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
</pre>
</blockquote>
<font size="-1"><font face="Futura Book">Agreed, for some reason it has
disappeared from the repositories, but it's very easy to install from
the VMWare site. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
John<br>
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