mindless ramblings

After lots of tinkering around, I’ve finally got Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) to work more or less properly in VMware Workstation 5.5.1. The actual installation is quite easy, you just create a new virtual machine, allocate some space for it and off you go. It’s just like a real install on a physical system. I like the new install, you actually do it through the Live CD for the desktop edition so it’s all graphical. No command-line to scare people off here.

The difficult part is installing VMware Tools in order to take advantage of the features like Shared Folders and mouse movement between the physical and virtual OSes. The main problem is that VMware Tools only recognizes Xorg 6 and below. As Dapper uses Xorg 7, the installation is unable to detect the proper version and it’s not fully installed.

Thankfully, some searching on the Ubuntu forums led a method that works! It’s located here and although its actually written for Fedora Core 5, it should work for Ubuntu too since both use Xorg 7. Make sure you do the final step in order to enable auto-moving between OSes and mousewheel scrolling.
Would I use it as my main desktop? I’m not sure. Ubuntu is secure, speedy and there are Linux versions of pretty much every Windows application so migrating is not a big issue. The main problem for me would be games. I could pretty much run Linux-everything except for games so I guess this method will have to suffice for me (or maybe dual-boot). I wouldn’t mind dual-booting actually but I’m just wary of losing all my data when repartitioning… cos that would be an unmitigated disaster!