Forget Cygwin and VMware, run coLinux

Until a week ago I would have said that Cygwin was the best available way to hybridize Windows and *nix. I was relatively happy with my xterms and ssh. But that was all that I could use it for. Running X applications compiled for Cygwin was unusably slow. So I had to use VNC to connect to run X11 apps. Well, I no longer have Cygwin on my machine, it has been replaced by Cooperative Linux.

I don't know what rock I've been hiding under for the past two years but I had not heard of Cooperative Linux until a few weeks ago. Cooperative Linux is a recompilation of the Linux kernel as a Windows executable. All of the native posix commands get remapped to the Windows kernel. And it's fast. It's unbelievably fast. Once the kernel is running, it can run native Linux binaries. In other words, you can boot your Debian/Gentoo/*buntu/etc. distribution while in Windows without any binary recompilation a la VMWare or Virtual PC.

VMWare Tools

VMWare Tools makes the guest OS far more responsive. VMWare Tools is available for Windows, Linux, Netware and FreeBSD. This was in version 5.5 of tools. The newer version of tools may have Solaris. It would be nice to have Solaris.

VMWare Tools on Windows is straightforward. After installing, enable full hardware acceleration.


VMWare Tools on Ubuntu 7.04

Instructions are provided at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware/Tools

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Everything runs file until this question:

What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running kernel?
[/usr/src/linux/include]

/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.20-16-generic/include

And then it complains again: The directory of kernel headers (version @@VMWARE@@ UTS_RELEASE) does not match your running kernel (version 2.6.20-16-generic).

As per this entry, modified /usr/src/linux/include/linux/version.h and added the line:

#define UTS_RELEASE "2.6.20-16-generic"

I guess I'll have to use Ubuntu 6.10

Virtual Computing Chart

Whether you think of this new computing offering as On-Demand Computing or Utility Computing or Reducing Complexity – or whether you use a vendor name like HP’s Adaptive Enterprise or Sun’s N1, it all comes down to getting more for your money and having your computing investments work more smoothly and adapt better to fast changes in your business needs.

VMWare AMD Dual-Core issues

VMWare complains...

"Your host's BIOS does not have valid NUMA information. Please update the host's BIOS or associate the virtual machine with the processors in a single NUMA code (CEC). Please read VMWare Knowledge Base articles 928 and 1236."

Motherboard is ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe.

Installed AMD Dual-Core Optimizer and AMD Athlon™ 64/FX Processor Driver for Windows XP. Will disable Cool n Quiet in BIOS now as suggested by xilog.

VMware Server on Debian

VMware has just released version 1.0 of its free VMware Server. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free). In this article we use Debian Sarge (3.1) as the host operating system.