VMware on Michael’s Domain

How do I run the Gene Construction Kit under Linux?

Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There are only a few Mac or Windows programs that don’t have a good equivalent on Linux. One of these few is the Gene Construction Kit (GCK) from Textco . GCK is available for both Windows and Mac. So it should be possible to run it on an i86-Linux machine using wine (a sort of emulator). I tried that and failed (I didn’t try really hard). However, probably any Windows program can be run under Linux using VMware . Unfortunately VMware is commerical and expensive (but there is a fully functional time-limited demo). GCK does run under VMware 4.0/W2K/RedHat9 without problems. The only disappointment in VMware is the “Shared Folders” option. It is much better to share your Linux home directory via Samba and then have it automounted when you log into your emulated Windows OS. I even managed to hide Linux-specific files in my home directory that start with a dot (like .mozilla) by inserting “hide dot files = yes” into the samba configuration file /etc/samba/smb.conf. Although I am using VMware at the moment, I plan to switch to Wine in order to avoid any Microsoft code.

Wine and Crossover Office

Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Being fed up with VMware (because it’s so slow and using half of my memory) I turned to Wine . But Wine appears to be very difficult to set up. Typical Linux. It will work but unless you spend a whole week you don’t get it working. That’s where the Corssover Office application comes in. It’s just a bunch of helper applications to make setting up wine easy. That is with certain Windows applications and most Windows applications are not supported. So I got a demo version of Crossover Office and started installing (as root). The application installed without problems. After installation I started the Crossover Office Setup application. That is the place from where you install your Windows applications. So I wanted to try Microsoft Office XP (as it is licensed for the whole university). I made the mistake to select “Install everything”. The installer forced me to install also Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and a bunch of other crap. Than the Office XP installer stopped to respond in the middle of the process. Waited for 2 hours but the progress bar didn’t move and there was no disc activity. So I had to cancel the setup and leave a mess behind. A second attempt to install failed as well. So I thought to use the Windows uninstaller. Failed as well. Uninstalling from within crossover office failed also. So I thought to uninstall the whole crossover office (there is an uninstall script in the bin directory of crossover office which is hardly mentioned anywhere in the documentation). That worked but apparently didn’t uninstall everything. I still had to manually remove several directories, but worst of all the Gnome menu entries were not deleted. The gnome menu entries are quite a tricky thing since they are not located in one place. Gnome uses some “virtual folder” (vfolder) system to create the menus. That is the menus are assembled on the fly based on several xml files located in several places. But I guess I found all of them and removed the entries manually. I must have made a coding mistake since after this the whole menu was gone. Apparently the mistake was in my ~/.gnome2/vfolders/applications.vfolder-info file. Of course I didn’t have a backup, so I copied the same file from /root/.gnome2/vfolders into my home folder.After that I reinstalled crossover office and only installed Microsoft Word XP and that worked! An nice entry was visible in the menu “Windows Applications/Programs/”. Then I installed Adobe Photoshop 6.01. Installation was painless, but after that, the Microsoft Word entry in the menu had disappeared. Also there was no Photoshop entry under “Windows Applications/Programs/Adobe”. There was only an ImageReady entry. It appears that every newly installed application erases the menu entries of the previously installed application. However the hierarchical folder structure remains, only the last entry ins gone and replaced by a dot in the last menu folder. BTW Photoshop worked as one can start it up from within ImageReady.Both Office XP and Adobe Photoshop are applications that are “supported” by the Crossover Office. Now I tried to install an unsupported application, i.e. the Gene Construction Kit 2.5 (GCK2.5). The first thing was that the Crossover Office complained that the installer CD has some hidden files and that I have to make some changes to the fstab entries as root to enable reading these files. I did that and continued installation. The installer finished and there was a menu entry under “Windows Applications/Programs/Gene Construction Kit 2.5” which was named “Uninstaller”. I concluded that the Uninstaller program had been installer after the GCK2.5 application and thus erased the latter entry. Even more strangely after logging out and in again even the Uninstaller item was gone from the menu. Also all other program entries had disappeared.I figured that all the menu entries are single files in the directory /home/jeltsch/.gnome2/applications. They have the extension .desktop and are xml files with a relatively easy structure. One example:> more Internet\ Explorer.desktop[Desktop Entry]Name=Internet ExplorerType=ApplicationComment=Internet ExplorerExec=/opt/cxoffice/bin/wine “C://Program Files//Internet Explorer//IEXPLORE.EXE” X-Created-by=cxoffice Icon=/home/jeltsch/.cxoffice/dotwine/fake_windows/Windows/Icons/9d75_iexplore.-32528.xpm [jeltsch@mcblpc2 applications]$ more CXTree-Windows_Applications-Programs-Internet_Explorer.desktop[Desktop Entry]Name=Internet ExplorerType=ApplicationComment=Internet ExplorerExec=/opt/cxoffice/bin/wine “C://Program Files//Internet Explorer//IEXPLORE.EXE” X-Created-by=cxoffice Icon=/home/jeltsch/.cxoffice/dotwine/fake_windows/Windows/Icons/9d75_iexplore.-32528.xpm Categories=Application;X-cxoffice;X-CXTree-Windows_Applications-Programs;It appears that all entries that were made by the Crossover Office Installer are still present in this directory. Now I just have to figure out why they don’t show up. Of course I can start the applications by just typing the entry under Exec into the command line but that is somehow cumbersome. To test GCK2.5 I started it from the command line and it really came up. First it asked for the installer CD (some kind of copy protection mechanism). It was in the drive but somehow I had to eject it and insert it again to make it visible. That worked fine and the dialog appeared where I entered my name and organization. But then it miraculously complained: “Could not start the application because there is not enough memory”.Now I have to tackle this problem, because GCK2.5 is probably the most important application for me that has not Linux equivalent.

VMware and nonstandard screen resolutions of laptops

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

My laptop screen is a 1280x800. This resolution is not supported by the graphic driver of VMware. Under Windows 98, I unchecked the autofit option, resized the VMware window to a weired size, went to the Windows registry (in Windows 98 it’s three hidden files called system.dat, user.dat and policy.pol) and changed the Resolution entry (which was something like 966,558) to 1280,800. After rebooting the resolution was OK when I selected fullscreen. However, in windowed mode the resolution does not become adjusted to the smaller size, but instead you get scroll bars. But in Windows 98, networking doesn’t want to work. I am connected (webbrowsing, etc. works) but whenever I try to browse the local area network I gt the error: “Unable to browse the network”. In Windows 2000, the same trick with the resolution didn’t work. The registry entry is also called differently “Resolution.KVM”. Before that entry there are different other entries called resolution. But as they consist of complex number series, I don’t know how to edit them. So I am using the 1078x768 resolution although it obviously locks fuzzy on my 1280x800 screen. After updating to VMware 4.5.2 (build 8848) I am able to adjust to 1200x800 also with the Windows 2000 guest OS. In full screen mode everything is fine, but when I run in windowed mode and “fit guest to window”, the settings are lost from the windows registry and I have to manually edit them, and reboot to be able to get full screen resolution back to 1200x800.

VMware and Samba

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

VMware can interfere with Samba. When you are running a samba server on your computer and install VMware, you might break your samba server. You can check that by:sudo /etc/init.d/smb statusIf the result is “dead” and if VMware is running its own samba server (which you can check by ps -aux and then looking for an entry like vmware-smb), then you have to rerun vmware-config.pl. In RedHat, there is an easy way to remove the vmware samba server from starting up (system Settings -> Server Settings -> Services; just stop the service and uncheck the box if you don’t want it to start up upon system boot). In Suse 9, I just re-run the vmware-config.pl script. When it asks something like: do you want vmware to set up file access to the host computer, then you should say no.

VMware setup error (libpopt)

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The error message during VMware setup (vmware-config.pl) is due to the fact that Suse 9 has a too new package for the requested library:/usr/bin/vmware-smbpasswd.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpopt.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directoryThe following fixes the problem:ln -s /usr/lib/libpopt.so.1 /usr/lib/libpopt.so.0

Installing Windows95 under VMware

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

You need: the Windows95 installation CD and a Windows 95 version B boot floppy . As I don’t have a floppy drive I have to create a floppy image of the boot floppy. Under VMware boot from the Windows95 boot floppy. Create a primary partion that fills the virtual disk completely (options 1 and then 1 again and then yes). Reboot Windows95. Format the virtual disk and install Windows95: format C: /S R:\WIN95\SETUP /IS I couldn’t get my installation CD to work. So I made an image of it dd if=/dev/cdrom of=w95oem.iso Then the rest should be a routine install…

Problems installing VMware tools (manual installation)

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

For some reason VMware 4.5.2 didn’t manage to update the VMware tools using the regular option under “VM -> Install VMware tools…”. So I had to install them manually: sudo /sbin/losetup /dev/loop1 /home/your_username/vmware-distrib/lib/isoimages/windows.iso mkdir /home/your_username/temp sudo mount -r -t iso9660 /dev/loop1 /home/your_username/temp/ As my home directory is visible under VMware, I started the setup.exe manually. Everything went OK, although VMware still complains after the reboot that my VMware tools are out of date…

Suse Linux 9.1/9.2 and vmware

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I downloaded again a VMware release to test (4.5.2). But it didn’t even wanted to be configured. Apparently Suse has screwed up the installation source directory tree structure. I found this fix: cd /usr/src/linux su make cloneconfig make prepare After this the vmware-config.pl should run ok. Before running the vmware-config.pl I also applied the vmware-any-any-update78 patch . BTW: You have to repeat this procedure everytime you update your kernel! After updating to 9.2 I had more problems. After every restart I had to execute vmware-config.pl again. This was fixed by adding for a in seq 0 9; do mknod /dev/vmnet$a c 119 $a; done to the beginning of the /etc/init.d/vmware file. After kernel updates the procedure before starting vmware-config.pl is cd /usr/src/linux make cloneconfig make modules_prepare

Windows XP guest from raw partition under VMWare 4, coLinux as rescue

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So far I never was able to run a Windows XP guest OS from a raw disk partition using Linux VMWare. Here’s the discussion thread .

Vmware and 'error while loading shared libraries': Suse's new gdk-pixbuf rpm is broken

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Still yesterday I have been running VMware on Suse Linux 9.1 and today (after I performed an online update of my system) I get: error while loading shared libraries: /opt/gnome/lib/gdk-pixbuf/loaders/libpixbufloader-xpm.so: Suse has broken this package… But I didn’t have any problems so far to run VMware, so I just have to figure out what I did today to break it. Apparently this error is due to my recent automatic update of my system: the culprit is gdk-pixbuf package 0.22.0-62.4. After I reverted to the older package 0.22.0-57 vmware started working again. To revert, just use from the command line: rpm -e –nodeps gdk-pixbuf Then install the older rpm (gdk-pixbuf-0.22.0-57.i586.rpm from the original Suse 9.1 CDs or ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1/suse/i586/gdk-pixbuf-0.22.0-57.i586.rpm). Addendum: VMware works with the new gdk-pixbuf-0.22.0-62.7.i586.rpm!