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VMware Fusion Thread

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nevermind1331
nevermind1331
Posted
Posted

Fusion is actually very nice. Runs stable and has great features (more than parallels). Of course, so far, it is slower.

 

Features not in parallels:

Dragging files directly into VM.

Built in iSight supported (you have to get the drivers and manually install them however)

Full custom resolution (drag the bottom right hand corner and VM automatically resizes. Excellent.)

 

Hopefully once the debug code is removed it will run better, but it probably replaces parallels for me right now.

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nevermind1331
nevermind1331
Posted
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I'm on a hackintosh, of course. :) I don't mean the connection of your mac but the internal nic. Parallels installed something called "Parallels Host Guest Adapter".

 

sorry, makes sense. My nic works perfect, and i did not have to change any settings.

 

Wish I could remove the debug code...

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munky
munky
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I just gave it a quick try on my MacBook Pro, but it cant (yet) boot my Bootcamp installation, so for me it offers nothing over Parallels. I dont care which camp gets there first, but I refuse to have TWO WinXP installs on my machine - I just want one I can choose to boot natively OR via a VM.

 

(Note to anyone who says this isnt possible - VMWare on Windows can do it, so why not Mac?)

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munky
munky
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Maybe someone clever could use this kind of trick? VMWare Fusion seems to use the same .vmx files...

 

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answer..._Linux_for_free

 

I would attempt it if it wasnt 2am and i hadnt just hosed my OS X install ;) (bloody MonoLingual - default strip operation removes PPC from all frameworks, thus Rosetta dont work no more :) )

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semthex
semthex
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I tried VMWare fusion as registered Beta tester but wasn't that impressed. A major feature missing was support for booting native installs from disk to VMWare, which is a basic feature I need. A second point I really was sad about were serveral existing problems with the GUI I encountered during testing.

 

I think I need to wait til the final release, if they don't fix the boot native probelm it will be useless for me.

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AriX
AriX
Posted
Posted
I tried VMWare fusion as registered Beta tester but wasn't that impressed. A major feature missing was support for booting native installs from disk to VMWare, which is a basic feature I need. A second point I really was sad about were serveral existing problems with the GUI I encountered during testing.

 

I think I need to wait til the final release, if they don't fix the boot native probelm it will be useless for me.

 

same for me, i really hope they let me boot native, and i also hope they give raw usb support because parallels still has bugs with that

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bgg71
bgg71
Posted
Posted
I just downloaded the beta from vmware and am running it now.

 

First impressions: Kernel panic after trying to close it without installing an OS.

 

1.83 GHz Macbook

2.0 GB DDR2 667MHz RAM

 

same on my hacintosh dell latitude d600 pentium mobile 1.4 GHz

have parallels running but is way to slow. However, at least it works. Registered with vmware to notify me when a public beta is available. The one I tried was from demonoid.

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jfpoole
jfpoole
Posted
Posted
Just for laughs, I ran Geekbench in VMWare and well...the results speak for themselves.

 

Yeah. Geekbench uses high-resolution timers that aren't always accurate on virtual machines, which is why some of the results look reasonable, while other results look quite unreasonable.

 

If you want accurate timers under VMWare (say if you want somewhat accurate benchmarks using Geekbench), you can set 

monitor_control.virtual_rdtsc = false

in the virtual machine configuration file. It might cause the guest OS to crash, though, so be careful!

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RTheDuke
RTheDuke
Posted
Posted
I was able to install it on my Hack with Pacifist. I can create a new VM, but when I try to start it up, i just get a white screen. See the pic. Could there be some sort of check that vmware has to see if you're using a real Mac?

 

picture1dk3.th.png

 

 

I had the same white screen , once the VM is started. It looks like the VM with XP is running underneat. maybe something with the video driver is wrong. Or maybe there is some .vmx switch to activate to make it running on the Hackintoshes.

 

Any ideas ? Having it running will be GREAT .... or : should i really get the "real" thing ?

 

P.S: Parallels seems working, indeed..... cheers, RTheDuke

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macgirl
macgirl
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I had the same white screen , once the VM is started. It looks like the VM with XP is running underneat. maybe something with the video driver is wrong. Or maybe there is some .vmx switch to activate to make it running on the Hackintoshes.

 

Any ideas ? Having it running will be GREAT .... or : should i really get the "real" thing ?

 

P.S: Parallels seems working, indeed..... cheers, RTheDuke

 

I believe it have to do with video capabilities, I installed VMware Fusion on my 10.4.7 installation, then tried to install from a XP CD Image without success, then I installed a XP on VMware in windows copied the image to the Mac partition ran Fusion same blank screen, then I upgraded to 10.4.8, now with QE and CI it shows the screen and runs without probs, I even copied my windows "settings" to have the same.

 

BTW I'm setting this thread as the "official" VMware Fusion thread and make it sticky.

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saivert
saivert
Posted
Posted

th_win2kinvmwarefusion2.jpg

(click for larger)

 

th_win2kinvmwarefusion-running.jpg

(click for larger)

 

Host system is a Hackintosh with nForce 4 chipset and AMD Opteron 150 @ 2,4GHz processor running Mac OS X 10.4.8 (kernel 8.8.1)

 

VMWare version:

vmware-version-33141.jpg

 

Oh, I almost forgot. The OLD classics we love.

th_win2kinvmwarefusion-classicprograms.jpg

(click for larger)

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Takuro
Takuro
Posted
Posted
Could there be some sort of check that vmware has to see if you're using a real Mac?

I'm pretty sure everybody's problems are due to the fact that the program basically sucks at this point. If it was stable enough, all the people who signed up as beta testers would've gotten an email. This is just some ultra-buggy test that was never intended to leak to anybody.

 

I wonder if VMware Fusion's development will slow down due to the upcoming release of Vista. Companies like VMware usually prioritize Windows compatibility before Mac compatibility.

 

Just for kicks: has anybody managed to use Fusion to boot into a physical disc and run their existing installation of Windows from within OS X?

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-jordn-
-jordn-
Posted
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hey,

 

does VMware Fusiom work okay on AMD processors? i heard somewhere that it relies heavily on the VT-X CPU extension that currently only the Intel processors based on their new core have.

 

any Opteron 165 users especially?

 

jordn

 

PS- sorry if im hijacking the thread.

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BladeRunner
BladeRunner
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Posted

I have tried - several times - to install the copy I got from the demon. each time it caused a kernel panic and I had to power off. So, I decided to experiment a bit.

 

I mounted the disk image and drug the install package to the desktop so I could edit the contents. Then in a terminal window:

 vi /Users/lrh/Desktop/VMware\ Fusion\ 1.0.pkg/Contents/Resources/postflight

This reveals the following:

#!/bin/bash

###
# Postflight script for VMware Fusion
# Copyright 2006 VMware, Inc.  All rights reserved.
###

set -e

export PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

LIBDIR="/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion"

# XXX: This writes files to LIBDIR.  Is that what we want?
#
# TODO: This takes about 15-30 seconds to run, and it runs every time
# the package is installed, upgraded, or reinstalled.  We could avoid
# it on upgrade and reinstall by moving this to a postinstall script,
# but people might want it to run on reinstall.
cd "$LIBDIR"
./vmware-config-net.pl

# Execute the boot-time script to load the kernel modules and start daemons.
"$LIBDIR/boot.sh"

I commented out the execution of "boot.sh", saved the file and then ran the install package. It completed without error.

 

When I tried to run vmware I got the results several have posted - it would start and open a blank white screen and nothing else.

 

When I tried to reboot my system it went from the gray apple with pinwheel to a black screen and hung. I had to power off. Reboot with -v showed the problem - a kernel panic.

 

I then booted the system in single user mode and went to have a look at the boot.sh file. I commented out what I thought might be causing the problem and restarted the system which booted to a gui.

 

This is what I found:

vi /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh

Editing the boot.sh file shows:

#!/bin/bash

###
# Startup script for VMware Fusion
# Copyright 2006 VMware, Inc.  All rights reserved.
###

set -e

export PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

LIBDIR="/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion"
VMNAT_LOGFILE="/var/log/vmnat.log"
LEASEFILE="/var/db/vmware/dhcpd.leases"

if [ ! -x "$LIBDIR/vmnat" -o ! -x "$LIBDIR/vmnet-dhcpd" ]; then
echo "Error: Programs $LIBDIR/vmnat or $LIBDIR/vmnet-dhcpd not found!"
exit 1
fi

if [ ! -e "$LIBDIR/nat.conf" -o ! -e "$LIBDIR/dhcpd.conf" ]; then
echo "Error: $LIBDIR/nat.conf and $LIBDIR/dhcpd.conf must both exist!"
exit 1
fi

# TODO: We should check (and write)  PID files for these rather than using
# killall.
killall vmnat || true
killall vmnet-dhcpd || true

kextunload "$LIBDIR/kexts/vmmon.kext" || true
kextunload "$LIBDIR/kexts/vmioplug.kext" || true
kextunload "$LIBDIR/kexts/vmnet.kext" || true

# kextload "$LIBDIR/kexts/vmmon.kext"
# kextload "$LIBDIR/kexts/vmioplug.kext"
# kextload "$LIBDIR/kexts/vmnet.kext"

# TODO: We should use launchd to start up both vmnat and vmnet-dhcpd.
# "$LIBDIR/vmnat" -c "$LIBDIR/nat.conf" vmnet8 > "$VMNAT_LOGFILE" 2>&1 &

# vmnet-dhcpd puts itself in the background (daemon mode)
# "$LIBDIR/vmnet-dhcpd" -cf "$LIBDIR/dhcpd.conf" -lf "$LEASEFILE" \
#	 -pf /var/run/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet8.pid vmnet8

 

As you can see, I have commented out the portion starting with the kextload commands. On my system - specs below - attempting to load any of the vmware kexts causes a kernel panic - either in single user mode or when running the boot.sh command in a terminal window.

 

I believe the reason for the nonfunctional white screen that some of us have seen is the lack of the vmware kext packages being loaded. Sadly, I have hit the end of my skill set here and don't know how to resolve the problem.

 

I did check. The files & kext packages have the correct owner & file mode.

 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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