A shiny new system

Last week, in a moment of weakness, I forgot my rule to never update the kernel of the host OS. Whether I've really followed it assiduously I don't really remember, but in hindsight it seemed like a good rule; because the following morning the system started but GDM didn't. I could ssh in from outside but no console. Being a bit of a newbie (or rather an oldie who hasn't yet learned his way around Linux), I didn't manage to figure out what had happened (probably something to do with the proprietary ATI/Radeon driver which I installed in another moment of weakness a year or so ago), or rather how to fix it. So, after a considerable amount of messing around, patience began to give way to a sense of needing to do something drastic. So I decided to replace the host Ubuntu 8.04 LTS system with Ubuntu 9.10.

The first big difference is support for software RAID right out of the box. This was excellent news, since the host OS sits on a RAID10 array and my data on RAID5, and keeping everything in tact took some effort when I moved from Fedora to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

Not everything went smoothly. VMware Workstation 6.5.3 doesn't install properly. The installer hangs when configuring VMware Player, and while there is a workaround, there are other issues. A patch needed to get it running with the 2.6.29 and later kernels only seems to work on 6.5.2 (for which the patch application script was written) and I wasn't able to modify it to work on 6.5.3.

So back to VMware Workstation 6.5.2; here there is a mouse / screen position problem. The mouse is 'lost' to the guest at the edges of the screen. Some searching suggested a GTK problem but fortunately VMware can be directed to use it's own shipped version of GTK (add "export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes" to /etc/vmware/bootstrap).

So far so good; 24 hours in and everything is back to normal.

At one point, before I found the mouse issue fix, I did contemplate going to Sun's VBox. It's pretty, but...

I converted my guests to ovf format; this required some editing of the ovf and mf files, the former because the sound card wasn't recognized by VBox import, and the latter because editing the ovf file means changing the SHA1 sums in the mf file. After converting the guests, I tried booting them: the Windows guest crashed, I think because Windows is rather fussy about its (virtual) hardware and perhaps the removal of the sound card was too much? I'm guessing here. The Ubuntu 9.10 guest came up but VBox doesn't have a video driver that presents the guest with a 1680x1050 screen so it took a while to get the guest to fill the screen. It was a bit flaky sometimes reverting back to 640x480, and once just scrambling the signal completely. All in all (and this is just my lay-persons opinion) it felt rather Mikey mouse compared to VMware.

So back to VMware it is. And now I promise I'll never install a propriety video driver again (yup, we've heard that before...).