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VM: using VMWare's vmware-player for free virtual machines, installing from Live CDs or isntall CDs, and so on. And Parallels, too. Kubuntu.
Thu, 05 Jun 2008

This short posting might be way over the top for some people; thats okay.. if you don't want to know about virtual machines, you're probably better off :) I just wanted to be able to run Kubuntu (a Linux distribution) under Windows.

A virtual machine is a software application that within itself pretends to be a machine of some sort; an arcade game emulator is an application you run that within itself looks like an arcade machine so those games can run within it. VMWare is a company who writes a virtual machine engine that allows you to run a Windows or Linux or whatever 'real computer' within itself.. on your computer. While at first you might just think this an asinine experiment, to us IT nerds it can be quite beneficial.. instead of having 5 actual PCs on your desk, you can use one good one running a half dozen virtual machines within itself.. handy for software testing during development, or for running many servers within one (and when one virtual server dies, you can just restart the virtual machine application for it.. much easier than rebuilding a new physical machine.)

Anyway, in the past I was a big fan of VMWare -- rock solid. Of late a competitor has come out - Parallels - originally for Mac and now also for the PC. (There are others, and various open source options as well. But for my purposes I'm talking about the big boys here.) I tried Parallels on my Mac a couple years ago and it seemed okay, but I never much got into it as I was trying to operate it via a remote desktop connection, and Parallels could never get the mouse to work right. (They claim its due to acceleration on the machine at my fingertips, factored against the mouse acceleration on the machine I was logged into, against the mouse acceleration of the machine being emulated. I think they're jut lazy.)

Parallels is very inexpensive (say $60CDN?), so when I had need of something recently I thought to jump on their Windows build. Tried to install a Kubuntu 8 into it, and failed. Tried Kubuntu and Ubuntu 7.. failed. Saw a pile of posts online about CD emulation problems and fiddled with many options but in the end.. many hours spent, and no results. Sucks. So probably a good tool when it works, but if it cannot handle installing one of the most popular Linux distributions... it has issues still. Fine.

So what to do, after having already popped a few dollars for Parallels? VMWare Workstation is more expensive ($180 give or take CDN), and I was already in for Parallels. Now, don't get me wrong.. I really like VMWare, so I am seriously considering popping for VMWare Workstation. Again (I've bought it 10 years ago, too.) But we just moved, and I'm very much broke right now.. but fortunately, VMWare has a free offering -- the VMWare Player.

VMWare Player lets you run a virtual machine that someone else has created. I started to get myself confused though -- what is the difference between created or not, for installation of an OS on a blank machine? Are they really just talking about paying $180 for the version which knows how to create the virtual machine description/configuration? If you're bandying about a full install, then it makes sense.. given the disk image, just run it in VMWare Player. But for installing a fresh OS ... what is 'created' versus not 'created'? A fully created blank machine cannot be much work, right? (One can aqssume Workstation also includes administration tools and so on and so forth.)

Turns out I am right.. I cast my eyes around for details on what makes up a VMWare descriptor, to see if I could just create one by hand (that is null and empty), and see what VMWare Player does with it. Empty disk image files can be found in various places online or created using freeware tools. You can specify a Ubuntu (say) Live CD as the virtual CDROM. All you need now is the virtual machine description file .. it would seem the commercial VMWare product really just creates this file, and the empty disk images (and administratoin and so forth).

In a few web forums I found references to this snippet.. create 'foo.vmx' and paste in the following. I've noted some customizatoins you might wish to make. 

config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "3"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.filename = "Ubuntu.vmdk"		# name of disk image to use
memsize = "256"				# pretty small, maybe need to increase it
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"

#ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"	# use this pair of lines for actual CD drive
#ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

ide1:0.fileName = "ubuntu-5.10-install-i386.iso" # use this (fixing filename) for an ISO
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
floppy0.present = "FALSE"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
usb.present = "TRUE"
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
displayName = "Ubuntu"
guestOS = "Ubuntu"
nvram = "Ubuntu.nvram"
MemTrimRate = "-1"

ide0:0.redo = ""
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
uuid.location = "56 4d 5c cc 3d 4a 43 29-55 89 5c 28 1e 7e 06 58"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 5c cc 3d 4a 43 29-55 89 5c 28 1e 7e 06 58"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:7e:06:58"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"

tools.syncTime = "TRUE"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"

uuid.action = "create"

checkpoint.vmState = ""

Simple store that file alongside the disk image, and point to the right .iso .. and boom, your free VMWare player can now create a VM for Ubuntu or whatever you should like to install there. Kudos to John Bokma, the apparent head vampire for this VM description file.

Armed with this setup, I installed Kubuntu 8 into the VM; VMWare Player is clever enough so that networking works from the virtual network card, so running web browsers and so on within the VM works fine.

UPDATE: Rickard informs me of a website that builds vmx files for you -- how interesting is that? Check the site out here: http://www.easyvmx.com/

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