Getting ready to setup my PC as a VMWare Server, got a new WD Caviar Black 500GB 32MB cache Internal drive so I can dump all my files on it to clean off a pair of 250GB drives to run the VM’s on. I learned a long time ago you want different HDD‘s for each VM if they are to be active, as the slowest part of a computer these days are the HDD’s and the last thing you want is more than one OS trying to run off the same HDD. Would be nice if I could talk myself into the cost of a few SSDs. Below are some links I am finding while I research that sound useful or interesting, not all are exactly pertaining to what I am trying to do, some may be helpful with things I am going to do after I get it setup, so I’ll be adding things to this post as I find them, to build up some information links for setting up my VMWare server.
- a forum post where someone describes exactly what they install as their host linux machine to run the VMWare server on, unfortunately this is for CentOS, which is okay, just not my preferred Linux distro. and unfortunately according to VMWare’s website, Ubuntu, CentOS, and RHEL are the only supported Linux Distro’s… I wonder while they do not support FreeBSD as well? oh well, we shall see how it goes.
- a great article on setting up Ubuntu JeOS, although JeOS is designed for being set up as a virtual machine, I want to see if it can be used as the host OS for VMWare Server also, and will be the first Host OS I will try when my new drive arrives. (that should be interesting, I’ll try and keep good notes)
- Using Kernel Mode Virtual Machine on any Linux Distro with kernel 2.6.20 or newer. Also not what I was looking for, but a great alternative, this is a guide book giving step by step instructions for setting it up and installing your guest OS, including command line inputs for setup.
- setting up an IPCop Virtual Machine to manage your internet traffic, of course now I need to go and figure out exactly what it does (I can guess, but like to know more details). Still not exactly what I started looking for, but these are the things I have been finding while looking and are still useful. Setting up IPCop like this is definitely something I would be interested in doing to simplify my network protection; although I have a Sheeva Plug computer that I purchased specifically to do this, and just never got around to setting it up. (Still have to get it flashed to a new version on it’s NAND rom so the SD cards can work, so I can put a decent sized storage card on their to do all I want to do with it.)
(must be a problem with IE8 that is preventing me from inserting the web links, I’ll update this post later from Google Chrome and if it doesn’t work, then I’ll try it from Fedora and see if it works then. Until then, I am sorry but I will not be posting referrence links to everything I type.)
(well everything works fine from Google Chrome under Windows 7, as you can see from the improvements to this post. Unless of course you are seeing it for the first time now… :)
Right, my Sheeva Plug showed up, I got it setup pretty quick and was using it to remote in from work, and access an HP Pavillion ZV6015us laptop I was trying to get up and running with any version of linux. I tried many, FreeBSD 7.0, 7.2, 7.3?, DesktopBSD 1.7 1.6?(which unfortunately is based on FreeBSD 7.1 6.2, then Kubuntu 7.10 and 8.04, Slax 6.x, Puppy Linux, might have missed one… all were x64 when available.
ok, so ALL of the Linux versions listed above installed just fine (some took a couple of tries to get the drive partitioning correct, but eventually I got them working…) the laptop was mostly stock, I had to replace the LCD inverter in it a few years ago to get the display to light up again after it stopped working, I also switched out the stock 5400 rpm 100Gig drive with (at the time the largest) 80 Gig 7200 rpm 2.5″ drive. The main problem I was having, was getting the audio to work on some, and the wireless to work on all of them.
(the listed attempts below are not necessarily the order I tried them in)
Fedora I tried both the KDE and the Gnome desktop install versions. I prefer KDE; however in Gnome the wireless and sound was working, but in KDE the wireless would not work. I tried NDISWrapper, some manually created drivers (someone else’s I’m not THAT good…), and the default drivers. Fedora Gnome worked fine, but KDE would not.
I tried Ubuntu 7.x, it worked with proprietary drivers installed with no issues, 8.x would not allow me to install the proprietary drivers for the wireless or the ATI onboard video. Kubuntu did not even detect that I had a wireless adapter. and manually installing the ATI Linux drivers caused so many system problems I reformatted 3 times trying to get them to work.
Puppy Linux worked out of the box with no problems as far as hardware was concerned (it took some finagling to get the audio working), as long as I loaded it into ram, if I did not use the boot parameter “pfix=ram” the system would not display correctly and I would have to manually power off the laptop and restart. The problem was, I could not get it to install on the Hard Drive, even when following the directions I found online. The problem I was having was that I could not connect to any wireless network. Mine and all of my neighbors wireless networks showed up, but I could not get the system to connect to any of them.
Slax also would not install to the HDD, although I managed to get it to install to a VHD. But I could not get the wireless to work at all, and the video drivers would not install, so any 3D apps would not work either and could crash the system.
FreeBSD – could not get any GUI/WM to load other than XWindows, I spent almost 3 months trying to get this one working.
Desktop BSD – loaded great, but the linux kernel that it uses does not have support for the wireless card chipset. everything worked great, but I could not get the wireless to work. This I learned after many google searches was was because the FreeBSD base was older, and the reason this was older, was because FreeBSD made some major changes from 6.2 – 7.x and DesktopBSD had not yet moved on, which they have now, so I may try it again if FreeBSD 8.0 doesn’t suit my fancy!!
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