Installing VMWare on Gentoo

This article covers how to install VMWare on Gento Linux if you are getting errors like the "/etc/init.d/vmware: line 919: [: -: integer expression expected" error when trying to configure the VMWare options.

How to shrink a VMWare Fusion Linux virtual disk

VMWare Fusion on Mac OSX allows you to shrink virtual disks easily for Windows virtual machines right from the graphical interface (Virtual Machine -> Settings -> General -> Clean Up Virtual Machine) but there isn’t the same option to do this with Linux, so you need to do it from the command line.

Connect a USB device with VMWare Server 2

I recently replaced my Windows Vista desktop/host machine with Windows 7 Release Candidate and switched from VMWare Server version 1 to VMWare Server version 2. Version 2 uses a web based management interface and each virtual machine can be accessed in a separate remote console.

I needed to connect a USB printer to one of the virtual machines and was surprised to not see any USB devices shown in the “Devices” drop down box in the remote console. This is shown in the first screenshot below where you can see the virtual CD/DVD devices and network adapter but no USB devices:

show devices with vmware server console

For some reason these don’t show up under the devices drop down box so you have to go into the web management console and connect the USB device there. This is shown in the screenshot below where the red arrow (added for the screenshot) shows the USB device drop down box.

usb device option in vmware infrastructure web access

Click the USB button and it shows the devices that can be connected. This isn’t the most convenient way of connecting a USB device (it would be easier if the USB devices were shown in the device drop down in the remote console) but at least it can be done.

How to shrink a VMWare virtual disk

I use VMWare Server on several different computers to run virtualized Linux webservers for developing websites and for testing various versions of Internet Explorer. I recently needed to reduce the size of a Linux virtual disk to fit it onto a USB stick to copy to another machine but simply deleting files does not reduce the size of the disk image. This post links to another article offsite which shows how to do this and adds a couple of notes about it.

How to enable mouse wheel scrolling in Kubuntu under VMWare

I’ve just set up a new VMWare virtual machine with Kubuntu 8.04 and the scroll wheel on my mouse didn’t work. The steps to correct this are pretty simple and are covered in this post. This should work for any Ubuntu/Kubuntu variant when running in VMWare.

In a terminal session open the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. The following command illustrates doing this with the “nano” text editor:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
 

Locate the section labelled “InputDevice” which, by default, should look like this:

Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier  "Configured Mouse"
   Driver      "vmmouse"
   Option      "CorePointer"
   Option      "Device""/dev/input/mice"
 EndSection
 

Add the following to it:

Option"Protocol""ImPS/2"
 Option"Buttons""5"
 Option"ZAxisMapping""4 5"
 

so it now looks like this:

Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier  "Configured Mouse"
   Driver      "vmmouse"
   Option      "CorePointer"
   Option      "Device""/dev/input/mice"
 Option"Protocol""ImPS/2"
 Option"Buttons""5"
 Option"ZAxisMapping""4 5"
 EndSection
 

Then save the file, save any stuff in the applications you have open and log out. From the Kubuntu login screen, either do Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart the X Server and for the settings to apply, or click the little menu button and select the “Restart X Server” option as shown in the screenshot below. The menu option you need to click has a black arrow pointing at it in the screenshot below.

restart the x server from kubuntu login screen

After the X Server has restarted, the login screen will appear again so log in and the scroll wheel on your mouse should now work.