A man will die, but not his ideas.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Fixing Some of Guest OS Issues with VMWare Workstation on Linux

When the virtual machine image is stored on an NTFS partition, NTFS-3G hogs the CPU and freezes the machine very frequently leading to very slow performance of the virtual machine and possibly preventing you from using files on that partition during the freeze periods. The reasone is a bit complicated, but a temporary solution is mentioned here. Just add the following line to the .vmx file of the virtual machine.

mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE

Cannot connect to sound card because it is busy. Make sure knotify and Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESD) are not running. Kill those two processes (if they are active) and restart the vmware service just to make sure.
On Linux, VMWare frequently stopped my Shift/Ctrl/Alt keys from working when going back from the guest OS (was XP in my case) to Linux. A solution to this problem would be to use the setxkbmap command to reset the keyboard layout.
The arrow keys and other special keys are not functioning properly or not functioning at all. Create a config file in ~/.vmware directory and add this the following to the file then restart the vmware service.

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Labels: linux, ubuntu, VMWare, XP

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