Testing VMWare Beta 5 RC1

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I'm managing to steal some time from everything I'm supposed to be doing to finally install RC1 and start playing with it. Haven't gotten very far yet, but I thought I'd give you folks a heads up on it.

I noticed on the VMWare Beta boards that RC1 expires March 1st which means there will either be an RC2 or a full flavored version of VMWare Workstation 5.

 

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My initial reaction to RC1 is to be impressed. VMs respond much faster than in the previous build and they do not crash VMWare when attempting to suspend or unsuspend a VM. I installed VMWare Tools on both the Windows 2000 Pro and Red Hat 9 VMs almost flawlessly.

On the Red Hat box, I received this set of instructions at the end of installing VMware Tools in order to enhance networking:

/etc/init.d/network stop
rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
depmod -a
modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/network start

I ran the above set of comments and was warned that rmmod would be installed but would taint the kernel. It's a VM anyway so I took the plunge (not knowing what else to do). The Red Hat box seems none the worse for wear but I'll have to play with it to see.

I tried installing VMWare Tools on my SUSE 9.1 Pro VM and I hit a snag. After going through the menu and selecting all the defaults, I get:

Before running VMWare Tools for the first time, you need to configure it by invoking the following command: "/usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl". Do you want this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]

Naturally, I chose "yes" and received the following:

Stopping VMware Tools services in the virtual machine:
Guest operating system daemon: done
Guest filesystem driver: failed
Unable to create the directory /mnt/hgfs.

Execution aborted.

I posted the problem on the VMWare Beta 5 discussion boards and I guess we'll see. Here we go again.

 

Trip, that's very similar to the problem i'm hitting with SUSE 9.2 in VMware 4.5.2 - I get

Then,

Making sure services for VMware Tools are stopped.

Stopping VMware Tools services in the virtual machine:
Guest operating system daemon: done
cat: /proc/pci: No such file or directory
Trying to find a suitable vmhgfs module for your running kernel.

None of the pre-built vmhgfs modules for VMware Tools is suitable for your running kernel. Do you want this program to try to build the vmhgfs module for your system (you need to have a C compiler installed on your system)? [yes]

That's when I hit the wall as no C compiler. I know the problems differ towards the end, just wondering if there's any enlightenment there?

 

I had wondered if it was a SUSE thing but I was able to install VMware Tools in the earlier beta build and given how smoothly it went with Red Hat, I didn't think there'd be a problem. I'm periodically checking the VMware boards to see if I can get an answer, or at least a clue.

 

Update:

I got a response on the VMware boards suggesting:

I tried the suggestion and here's what happened:

The saga continues.

 

Got some responses on the VMware boards but nothing that made any difference. They talked about using a different mount point but that seems totally irrevelant. Sigh.

 

Now the VMWare guru is asking for the output of my /proc/mounts file. I posted it so we'll see what's next.

 

Well, I got VMware Tools installed. The error I was getting had to do with one function in VMware only having to do with the kernel the SUSE vm was using. When I bypassed it, I got VMware Tools to install.

You have to restart X and then run two different programs to execute the toolbox and then stop and restart network services. The only other problem after that was DNS. The SUSE vm was able to get an IP from DHCP but it was getting the DSL modem's IP as the first DNS server. I had to go in and point it to the ISP's DNS servers on the internet and could thereafter surf the web.

I'm downloading ton of patches now but this whole snark hunt could be for naught when I install VMware 5 RC2.