VMWare tools on Fedora Core 5

[William Lovaton]

Hello,

I've been doing some testing of RawHide on a virutal
machine I configured a few days ago with VMWare 5.5.1
build-19175.  Every thing is working fine except that
I can't install the VMWare tools on the guess
operating system to improve performance and imrpove
the display settings so I can use a decent resolution,
right now am stuck with 800 x 600.

Any idea about how to install the VMWare tools on FC5
guess OS?  when I try to do it gnome-volume-manager
crashes and it doesn't do anything, any attempt to
restart g-v-m results in a immediate crash.  The only
way to fix it is to cancel the installation of the
VMWare tools and then g-v-m can be started normally
again.

I hope it can be done because that performance gain
would be great, all in all I am very impressed with
FC5 performance.

Cheers,

-William

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[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 14:17 -0600, William Lovaton wrote:
> I've been doing some testing of RawHide on a virutal
> machine I configured a few days ago with VMWare 5.5.1
> build-19175.  Every thing is working fine except that
> I can't install the VMWare tools on the guess
> operating system to improve performance and imrpove
> the display settings so I can use a decent resolution,
> right now am stuck with 800 x 600.
>
> Any idea about how to install the VMWare tools on FC5
> guess OS?  when I try to do it gnome-volume-manager
> crashes and it doesn't do anything, any attempt to
> restart g-v-m results in a immediate crash.  The only
> way to fix it is to cancel the installation of the
> VMWare tools and then g-v-m can be started normally
> again.
>
> I hope it can be done because that performance gain
> would be great, all in all I am very impressed with
> FC5 performance.

VMware doesn't provide a driver for X.org 7.0. It isn't needed though,
as X.org already contains a FOSS driver for the VMware video card; you
just need to select a better monitor in the Display properties.

[Mike A. Harris]

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 14:17 -0600, William Lovaton wrote:
> > I've been doing some testing of RawHide on a virutal
> > machine I configured a few days ago with VMWare 5.5.1
> > build-19175.  Every thing is working fine except that
> > I can't install the VMWare tools on the guess
> > operating system to improve performance and imrpove
> > the display settings so I can use a decent resolution,
> > right now am stuck with 800 x 600.
> >
> > Any idea about how to install the VMWare tools on FC5
> > guess OS?  when I try to do it gnome-volume-manager
> > crashes and it doesn't do anything, any attempt to
> > restart g-v-m results in a immediate crash.  The only
> > way to fix it is to cancel the installation of the
> > VMWare tools and then g-v-m can be started normally
> > again.
> >
> > I hope it can be done because that performance gain
> > would be great, all in all I am very impressed with
> > FC5 performance.
>
> VMware doesn't provide a driver for X.org 7.0. It isn't needed though,
> as X.org already contains a FOSS driver for the VMware video card; you
> just need to select a better monitor in the Display properties.

Actually, VMware Inc. maintains the 'vmware' video driver that
is in X.Org.  It is the official X 'vmware' driver.  If users
have problems with this driver, please report them to X.Org
bugzilla in the proper component, so that the VMware Inc.
engineer(s) who maintain the driver are aware of the problem.

The VMware guys have done a good job of maintaining the driver,
and commit changes to CVS on a frequent enough basis that I'd
consider it to be well maintained personally.

The VMware software probably includes a vmware X driver also,
as all users out there may or may not have the latest driver
for a given X release, and they probably prefer it if users
use the latest driver than perhaps an older one that came with
their OS which may not have the latest bug fixes and features,
etc.

For Fedora users, I would recommend using the driver that ships
with Fedora, and filing bugs in Xorg bugzilla if problems arise.
If there are bugs in the driver, we can always patch it to be
on par with whatever the driver is that vmware ships with their
product, as it is the same driver as is in CVS head as far as
I am aware.

Hope this helps.

[William Lovaton]

Hi Mike, thanx a lot for your comments,

Now I changed my monitor setting so a I can use a
resolution of 1024 x 768 which is what my host system
can give.  But I discovered a little bug in
system-config-display.  Whenever I try to change the
Video Card setting in s-c-d, I don't get any window,
but got this in console (pushing the "Configure"
button in s-c-d):

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File
"/usr/share/system-config-display/xConfigDialog.py",
line 345, in configure_videocard
    self.state)
  File
"/usr/share/system-config-display/videocardDialog.py",
line 63, in __init__

selection.select_iter(videocard_store.get_iter_first())
TypeError: iter should be a GtkTreeIter

May be I should search in redhat's bugzilla and see if
it have been reported.

Do you know something about this problem?

Thanx to all of you, I now can use a decent resolution
without installing the VMWare tools.

However, in Windows you can use your mouse without any
hassle since VMWare grabs the input any time the
window gets the focus, with linux you have to click
(or Ctrl + G) and Ctrl + Alt to grab/release the focus
which is a little annoying.

Cheers,

-William

--- "Mike A. Harris"  escribió:
> Actually, VMware Inc. maintains the 'vmware' video
> driver that
> is in X.Org.  It is the official X 'vmware' driver. 
> If users
> have problems with this driver, please report them
> to X.Org
> bugzilla in the proper component, so that the VMware
> Inc.
> engineer(s) who maintain the driver are aware of the
> problem.
>
> The VMware guys have done a good job of maintaining
> the driver,
> and commit changes to CVS on a frequent enough basis
> that I'd
> consider it to be well maintained personally.
>
> The VMware software probably includes a vmware X
> driver also,
> as all users out there may or may not have the
> latest driver
> for a given X release, and they probably prefer it
> if users
> use the latest driver than perhaps an older one that
> came with
> their OS which may not have the latest bug fixes and
> features,
> etc.
>
> For Fedora users, I would recommend using the driver
> that ships
> with Fedora, and filing bugs in Xorg bugzilla if
> problems arise.
> If there are bugs in the driver, we can always patch
> it to be
> on par with whatever the driver is that vmware ships
> with their
> product, as it is the same driver as is in CVS head
> as far as
> I am aware.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> -- 
> Mike A. Harris, Open Source Advocate  * 
> http://mharris.ca
> Proud to be Canadian.
>
> -- 
> fedora-devel-list mailing list
> [e-mail]

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
>

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[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 16:26 -0600, William Lovaton wrote:
> However, in Windows you can use your mouse without any
> hassle since VMWare grabs the input any time the
> window gets the focus, with linux you have to click
> (or Ctrl + G) and Ctrl + Alt to grab/release the focus
> which is a little annoying.

FTR, I did manage to get vmware-tools built on 5.0 (sans video driver,
of course), but g-v-m keeps crashing.

[Richard Hughes]

On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 17:42 -0500, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 16:26 -0600, William Lovaton wrote:
> > However, in Windows you can use your mouse without any
> > hassle since VMWare grabs the input any time the
> > window gets the focus, with linux you have to click
> > (or Ctrl + G) and Ctrl + Alt to grab/release the focus
> > which is a little annoying.
>
> FTR, I did manage to get vmware-tools built on 5.0 (sans video driver,
> of course), but g-v-m keeps crashing.

Me too. I can't get any debug information out of g-v-m either (and
strace and gdb are not being helpful) -- any ideas?

Richard.

[Mike A. Harris]

William Lovaton wrote:
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File
> "/usr/share/system-config-display/xConfigDialog.py",
> line 345, in configure_videocard
>     self.state)
>   File
> "/usr/share/system-config-display/videocardDialog.py",
> line 63, in __init__
>
> selection.select_iter(videocard_store.get_iter_first())
> TypeError: iter should be a GtkTreeIter
>
> May be I should search in redhat's bugzilla and see if
> it have been reported.
>
> Do you know something about this problem?

system-config-display is maintained by other people, I don't really
follow it very closely, and tend to just do "s-c-d --reconfig" then
hand edit the results manually thereafter myself.

If it's not in bugzilla already, it's probably worth reporting though.

HTH

[Paul Dickson]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2005 20:31:30 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> William Lovaton wrote:
> > Traceback (most recent call last):
> >   File
> > "/usr/share/system-config-display/xConfigDialog.py",
> > line 345, in configure_videocard
> >     self.state)
> >   File
> > "/usr/share/system-config-display/videocardDialog.py",
> > line 63, in __init__
> >
> > selection.select_iter(videocard_store.get_iter_first())
> > TypeError: iter should be a GtkTreeIter
> >
> > May be I should search in redhat's bugzilla and see if
> > it have been reported.
> >
> > Do you know something about this problem?
>
> system-config-display is maintained by other people, I don't really
> follow it very closely, and tend to just do "s-c-d --reconfig" then
> hand edit the results manually thereafter myself.
>
> If it's not in bugzilla already, it's probably worth reporting though.

It's in there twice:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=176289
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=172036

-Paul

[William Lovaton]

Great, I'll comment on them, but those bug reports need to get some
attention from the respective maintainer.

Thanks,

-William

El sáb, 24-12-2005 a las 07:03 -0700, Paul Dickson escribió:
> On Fri, 23 Dec 2005 20:31:30 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> > system-config-display is maintained by other people, I don't really
> > follow it very closely, and tend to just do "s-c-d --reconfig" then
> > hand edit the results manually thereafter myself.
> >
> > If it's not in bugzilla already, it's probably worth reporting though.
>
> It's in there twice:
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=176289
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=172036
>
> -Paul

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[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 15:26 -0500, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 14:17 -0600, William Lovaton wrote:
> > I've been doing some testing of RawHide on a virutal
> > machine I configured a few days ago with VMWare 5.5.1
> > build-19175.  Every thing is working fine except that
> > I can't install the VMWare tools on the guess
> > operating system to improve performance and imrpove
> > the display settings so I can use a decent resolution,
> > right now am stuck with 800 x 600.
> >
> > Any idea about how to install the VMWare tools on FC5
> > guess OS?  when I try to do it gnome-volume-manager
> > crashes and it doesn't do anything, any attempt to
> > restart g-v-m results in a immediate crash.  The only
> > way to fix it is to cancel the installation of the
> > VMWare tools and then g-v-m can be started normally
> > again.
> >
> > I hope it can be done because that performance gain
> > would be great, all in all I am very impressed with
> > FC5 performance.
>
> VMware doesn't provide a driver for X.org 7.0. It isn't needed though,
> as X.org already contains a FOSS driver for the VMware video card; you
> just need to select a better monitor in the Display properties.

I was under the impression that the VMWare tools also include support
for DMA to hard disk, which drops the CPU load considerably on my box,
and also better networking support in the pcnet32 driver.  (I am only
running 5.5.0 right now, so I don't know about 5.5.1.)  I don't know how
to solve the g-v-m problem; I manually mounted the CD instead to install
the tools, and restarted g-v-m after installing the tools.

[William Lovaton]

--- "Paul W. Frields"  escribió:
> I was under the impression that the VMWare tools
> also include support
> for DMA to hard disk, which drops the CPU load
> considerably on my box,
> and also better networking support in the pcnet32
> driver.  (I am only
> running 5.5.0 right now, so I don't know about
> 5.5.1.)  I don't know how
> to solve the g-v-m problem; I manually mounted the
> CD instead to install
> the tools, and restarted g-v-m after installing the
> tools.

Hi Paul,

So you managed to install the tools? How did that go?
is it working good for you? did you see any indication
of the progress? I just see that g-v-m crashes but
other than that I don't see that VMWare tool are being
installed... did you get some feedback on your screen
or something? did you get a confirmation message that
the tool were installed ok?

Thanx,

-William

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[Thomas M Steenholdt]

William Lovaton wrote:
> So you managed to install the tools? How did that go?
> is it working good for you? did you see any indication
> of the progress? I just see that g-v-m crashes but
> other than that I don't see that VMWare tool are being
> installed... did you get some feedback on your screen
> or something? did you get a confirmation message that
> the tool were installed ok?

You guys could try the latest vmware-any-any patches from 
http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/ to see if that solves your issues. Whatever 
issue could easily be related to selinux, gcc stack protection or some 
other thing and the any-any patches tries to take care of weird 
situation like this. That said, i did not try installing FC5test under 
VMware workstation.

The way to install tools in a linux guest, IMHO, is selecting "install 
vmware tools", mount the cd in the guest, untgz and build the tools. 
That should take care of the entire thing.

Hope this helps

/Thomas

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 23:19 +0100, Thomas M Steenholdt wrote:
> William Lovaton wrote:
> > So you managed to install the tools? How did that go?
> > is it working good for you? did you see any indication
> > of the progress? I just see that g-v-m crashes but
> > other than that I don't see that VMWare tool are being
> > installed... did you get some feedback on your screen
> > or something? did you get a confirmation message that
> > the tool were installed ok?
>
> You guys could try the latest vmware-any-any patches from 
> http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/ to see if that solves your issues. Whatever 
> issue could easily be related to selinux, gcc stack protection or some 
> other thing and the any-any patches tries to take care of weird 
> situation like this. That said, i did not try installing FC5test under 
> VMware workstation.

Exactly so, WRT to the vmware-any-any patches.  I used them throughout
FC4 with VMWare 5.0 to great results.
> The way to install tools in a linux guest, IMHO, is selecting "install 
> vmware tools", mount the cd in the guest, untgz and build the tools. 
> That should take care of the entire thing.

Actually, I installed the RPM, which I would consider preferable in an
RPM-based distro. ;-)  Works just as well:

1. Mount CD manually (mount /media/cdrom)
2. run:  su -c 'rpm -ivh /media/cdrom/VMWare*rpm'
   (you can't use yum because the RPM is not signed -- this is not a big
deal since the package from whence the CD files come is, itself, signed)
3. run:  su -c 'vmware-config-tools.pl'
   (need kernel-devel and gcc installed)

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

On Sat, 2005-12-24 at 08:41 -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 23:19 +0100, Thomas M Steenholdt wrote:
> > William Lovaton wrote:
> > > So you managed to install the tools? How did that go?
> > > is it working good for you? did you see any indication
> > > of the progress? I just see that g-v-m crashes but
> > > other than that I don't see that VMWare tool are being
> > > installed... did you get some feedback on your screen
> > > or something? did you get a confirmation message that
> > > the tool were installed ok?
> >
> > You guys could try the latest vmware-any-any patches from 
> > http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/ to see if that solves your issues. Whatever 
> > issue could easily be related to selinux, gcc stack protection or some 
> > other thing and the any-any patches tries to take care of weird 
> > situation like this. That said, i did not try installing FC5test under 
> > VMware workstation.
>
> Exactly so, WRT to the vmware-any-any patches.  I used them throughout
> FC4 with VMWare 5.0 to great results.

That's for when Fedora is the host. The situation described above is
when Rawhide is the guest.

[William Lovaton]

Exactly, this is the case, Rawhide is the guest OS.  The Host is a
Fedora Core 3 system.

But I'm a little confused, some of you have been talking about that a CD
is necessary to configure the VMWare tools.  I just downloaded and
installed the RPM from the VMWare web site, in my case there is no CD.

And Paul mentioned something about vmware-config-tools.pl but I really
can't find it, it is not installed on my system.

As far as I can understand there is some kind of process (that I don't
know anything about) that needs to be done in the guess OS in order to
install the VMWare tools, can someone please enlighten me?

Cheers,

-William

El sáb, 24-12-2005 a las 09:11 -0500, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams escribió:
> That's for when Fedora is the host. The situation described above is
> when Rawhide is the guest.
>
> -- 
> fedora-devel-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

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[Felipe Alfaro Solana]

> But I'm a little confused, some of you have been talking about that a CD
> is necessary to configure the VMWare tools.  I just downloaded and
> installed the RPM from the VMWare web site, in my case there is no
> CD.

The "CD" is not a real CD, but a virtual CD emulated by VMware that
gets activated when you chose "Install VMWare Tools" from the VMWare
menu. Once activated, you can mount the CD from inside your guest OS
as usual.

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sun, 2005-12-25 at 02:40 +0100, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> > But I'm a little confused, some of you have been talking about that a CD
> > is necessary to configure the VMWare tools.  I just downloaded and
> > installed the RPM from the VMWare web site, in my case there is no
> > CD.
>
> The "CD" is not a real CD, but a virtual CD emulated by VMware that
> gets activated when you chose "Install VMWare Tools" from the VMWare
> menu. Once activated, you can mount the CD from inside your guest OS
> as usual.

Right, and then, after you install the RPM inside the guest OS (using
"rpm -ivh" as root), you will find you have a vmware-config-tools.pl
script available... again, make sure you have gcc and kernel-devel
installed.  Then run as root and enjoy.

[William Lovaton]

Wooowww! that's very clever, I'll try that as soon as I get to my
office.

Thanks a lot to all of you guys!.

-William

El dom, 25-12-2005 a las 11:34 -0500, Paul W. Frields escribió:
> On Sun, 2005-12-25 at 02:40 +0100, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> > > But I'm a little confused, some of you have been talking about that a CD
> > > is necessary to configure the VMWare tools.  I just downloaded and
> > > installed the RPM from the VMWare web site, in my case there is no
> > > CD.
> >
> > The "CD" is not a real CD, but a virtual CD emulated by VMware that
> > gets activated when you chose "Install VMWare Tools" from the VMWare
> > menu. Once activated, you can mount the CD from inside your guest OS
> > as usual.
>
> Right, and then, after you install the RPM inside the guest OS (using
> "rpm -ivh" as root), you will find you have a vmware-config-tools.pl
> script available... again, make sure you have gcc and kernel-devel
> installed.  Then run as root and enjoy.
>
> -- 
> fedora-devel-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

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