Installing VMWare Server and Running Windows XP on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid
Recently I was asked to do some .Net development and, unfortunately, my cranky old Win XP laptop is definitely not up to the challenge. Not wanting to buy a new machine or mess with my Ubuntu install I decided to try a virtual install using VMWare Server 2.0. The following isn't exactly a how to, it's more notes and links on what I had to do, so I have any easy reference for next time.
A very good walk through of installing VMWare Server on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex can be found here:
How to Install VMware server 2.0 in Ubuntu Intrepid
Once the install is complete, creating a new virtual machine is simple. The thing to remember – and this seems incredibly obvious now – is creating a new virtual machine doesn't install an operating system. Just because you've selected an OS as part of the creation process doesn't mean it's installed on the machine. What you have is a fresh PC configured to best run the OS you've chosen. The next step is installing the OS.
If you need to tweak the BIOS settings to change the boot order you may need to set your key mappings. I found I couldn't use the cursor keys to navigate around the BIOS. I can't find the website which gave me the information but correcting it was as simple as adding the following line to /etc/vmware/config.
xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = "TRUE"
You'll need to sudo or have root access in order to make this change.
In the end I didn't need to adjust the BIOS, but it's still a handy thing to know about.
Installing XP from the CD also caused problems. It didn't have the correcft drivers for the hard drive, but switching it to BusLogic drivers and following the instructions here solved the problem:
VMware: Installing Windows XP on ESX using LSI Logic driver
Once you have the OS installed and the machine up and running it's recommended you install VMWare tools, which come with VMWare Server.
After that I was finished! Aside from the endless procession of windows updates...
Next I want to try installing a few different OS's and after that, cloning my laptop.