Installing VMWare Player in Ubuntu
I’m in the midst of trying to get VMWare Player installed and pointing at the Vista side of things so I never have to boot into Vista natively again…I can (hopefully) just run it in VMWare’s Player from now on. The problem is that it is taking forever to get things installed. Here’s one crucial step that I needed…took me forever that I had to use sudo to get the installer to work:
My Ubuntu Installation
9. Installing VMware PlayerVMware Player is a free software which enables you to run Windows on your Linux PC. This needs an existing virtual machine which can be created with the non-free VMware Workstation, with the free QEMU and with the free VM Builder.
Note: VMware Workstation installs also the VMware Player so these steps are only needed if you don’t have a VMware Workstation installed.
VMware Player 2.x is not yet available for Ubuntu as a .deb package so you need to install it manually. Start by fetching the required .tar.gz file from the VMware Player download page.
# tar xzf VMware-player-2.0.1-55017.i386.tar.gz -C /tmp
# cd /tmp/vmware-player-distrib
# sudo ./vmware-install.pl
UPDATE: Abort! Abort! Abort! I tried all manner of drivers on the Vista side, but I could never get VMWare or VirtualBox to boot my Vista partition as a virtual hard drive. I did, however, succeed in borking my Vista partition twice such that it would blue screen upon start up and then retry. Luckily, I was able to get into the Vista partition via Ubuntu and get things back to normal again.
Anyway, if you want to see what I tried, go here. If you’re running Vista, you’ll need this too. Well, maybe not, as it didn’t really work for me.
Man, I feel downtrodden…no AWN curvy dock and now no raw disk action on the Vista partition. Sigh…maybe one day I’ll have my dock and my partition virtualization goodness.
Its much easier to use workstation and install vista like its a native install. But it is expensive and I can see why you might try and avoid that. My suggestion (and what I did) is to download the trial of workstation and try it out, make sure you like it, then just backup the virtual machine files, uninstall workstation and install vmware player by istelf, then just boot from the machine files. its a little round about, but trust me its A LOT easier.
OOOhhhh…that sounds so tempting. Perhaps this weekend.
Didn’t get a chance this weekend. May have to wait until turkey day.
[...] did some experimentation with a tip Luke left on my post regarding VMWare booting my Vista partition but ran into the same crashing issue upon boot with VMWare Workstation that I did with the hack-ish [...]