[ILUG] Re: VMware

[Niall]

On Sun, May 07, 2000 at 03:10:22PM +0100, adam beecher wrote:

> Now, a question. I downloaded and installed VMware for Linux, because I need to
> be able to edit sites in Windows and test in both. I had Windows 95 running on
> my primary partition at the time, and tried to create a virtual machine from
> "raw disk", as instructed by the docs. Everything went fine, but when I tried
> starting it, it got as far as the LILO prompt and then sent me a stream of "00
> 00 00...", etc. 


When you boot this disk, LILO runs and you get the garbage (I think) because
LILO sees a different environment than it was set up in. LILO is very fussy
about this - try adding or removing a disk drive, for instance. When I first
tried VMware, I gave up in despair because I couldn't even get it installed
- didn't want it badly enought to find out what was wrong. Now I've
converted to SuSE and it comes with VMware so it was easy enough to get
running (though not so easy with a customised kernel). 

Anyway, with a working VMware on SuSE I did get my 'doze partition booting
(I don't remember LILO problems, in fact I don't remember LILO at all, so I
suppose I did something different to you) but it wouldn't work properly, and
from what I deduce, I'd imagine it's very hard to get it to work. What
happens is that 'doze boots and then finds a whole slew of different
hardware (because it sees the eumlated things VMware provides rather than
your real hardware) and wants to run the configuration wizard and reboot a
bazillion times to get its act back together. Assuming that that eventually
does happen, you're then buggered next time you want to boot that partition
NOT under VMware because it'll see a whole slew of "new" hardware again, and
it's wizard-reboot time all over again. Repeat ad nauseam . . .

Now, I can't guarantee that that's what will happen. It's where I thought I
was heading, and I decided to head it off at the pass and reinstall 'doze
under VMware (simply start the VM with the 'doze CD in the drive) when it
would find all the "correct" hardware. I did that, and it works like a
charm. Of course it's a few hundred more MB of disk space down the toilet,
but disks are cheap so . .



Regards,


Niall