VMWare Server on a headless Debian Etch

I recently had to install VMWare Server on a server that didn’t have the GUI bits installed.  This is the list of additional packages that need to be installed for VMWare to install:

apt-get install psmisc libxrender1 libxt6

Then it will install, and the VMs can have GUI even though the host doesn’t!

VMWare server will not run after Debian Etch updates

VMWare didn’t start after I installed the latest Etch updates. The error message is printed to the terminal, which is pretty useless if you’re starting it from the GUI. Anyhow, the fix is pretty easy:

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

I guess the update had a new kernel and VMWare needed to re-install its hooks.

Network interfaces for a Debian Etch guest under VMWare

I’m using Debian Etch as a guest OS under VMWare. When you copy the VM (to another machine or another instance on the same machine), VMWare wants to give it a new UID (you should let it so you don’t end up with duplicate machines). A side effect is that you get a new ethernet MAC address. In Debian Etch, a side effect of that is that it thinks you have a new network card but it doesn’t forget about the old network card, so instead of the network interface being eth0, it is now eth1. And the next time you copy the VM, it is eth2, and so on.

It is really a pretty simple fix, once you know where to look. The clue is that udev is what is remembering the old MAC address. In my VMs, the addresses were in:

/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

It is just a plain text file. Delete the lines with the old MAC addresses and change the last one to be eth0.

Install VMWare server on Debian Etch

These are just my notes for installing VMWare server since I need to do it on a bunch of machines.

Load the prerequisites for VMWare server’s vmware-install.pl script (it should be a single line):

apt-get install libx11-6 libx11-dev libxtst6 xinetd wget linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential gcc binutils-doc make manpages-dev autoconf automake1.9 libtool flex bison gdb libc6-dev-amd64 lib64gcc1 gcc-2.95-doc

Extract the downloaded file:

tar -xvzf /root/VMware-server-1.0.2-39867.tar.gz

Get some serial numbers by filling out the form:

http://register.vmware.com/content/registration.html

Run vmware-install.pl with the defaults for everything except NAT networking which should be no.

Add the following to /usr/bin/vmware (on the first blank line):

export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes

The VMWare icon is under Applications/System Tools.

Debian rocks

I got my new machine from the Dell Outlet, so it wasn’t configured exactly the way I wanted, but close enough (anyone want a Bluetooth keyboard, cheap?).

The main reason I got it from the outlet was so I could get Windows XP instead of Vista. I wanted a legit license that I could run in a virtual machine. I wasn’t willing to shell out the additional $’s for the high-end version of Vista that you are allowed to run in a VM. I didn’t realize that Dell would remove the option of getting XP on a new box. Microsoft is really in control in a way that isn’t in a customer’s best interest.

I’m running Debian Etch on it. I was really impressed with how easy it was to install and how everything “just worked”. Video, sound, network, external USB drive, everything.

It is somewhat unfair to compare performance, since I don’t know what XP would have been like on the new hardware, but performance is fantastic. Everything has that nice instantaneous “pop”.

I installed VMWare Server (again, hassle-free, though it would have been nice if there was a .deb for it). I used the VMWare Converter to make an image of my old machine, and it just worked (well, it did after I managed to get Windows XP activated again, grrrrr…). Maybe it was because my old machine was such a dog, but performance seems excellent: it seems faster in the VM than it did on the real box!

Maybe this is just the honeymoon, but I am really impressed.