I thought a simple

sudo apt-get install vmware-player

would do the trick. Well, it looked good for a while – it downloaded the package and its dependencies and went through the license agreement and the configuration and even successfully started the VMware services. But then it died with:

VMware Player is installed, but it has not been (correctly) configured
for the running kernel. To (re-)configure it, invoke the
following command: /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl.

invoke-rc.d: initscript vmware-player, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing vmware-player (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 vmware-player
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I tried to reinstall it and I tried dpkg-reconfigure, but to no avail.

Incidentally, there is no file on my system called /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl; all I have is /usr/bin/vmware-config-network.pl and running that doesn’t help either.

Eventually, I found the answer here.

sudo rm /etc/vmware/not_configured

Hacky, but effective.

One of the nice things about Ubuntu Edgy Eft, is that there are packages available that make setting up Xen super easy.

Following the steps at the XenOnEdgy page at the Ubuntu Wiki, I quickly had an Edgy virtual machine (or a “domU” in Xen parlance) up and running. Unfortunately, the page doesn’t cover networking, but it’s actually pretty easy to add. I just added a simple /etc/network/interfaces file that set my machine up to use DHCP:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

It’s amazing how many virtualization technologies are out there these days:

• Xen
• User-mode Linux (UML)
• VServer
• OpenVZ
• QEMU
• Bochs
• VMware
• Wine

I’m upgrading my Ubuntu box at home from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft. The process thus far has been long and not without its hitches. The install has stopped a few times to ask me about config files and it died twice – once when a package download timed out and another time when it refused to install freebirth until I manually installed freebirth-data. At this point, I have the new lighter GNOME desktop background and I have Firefox 2.0, which seems a bit snappier to me. I also seem to have some new apps in my menu like F-Spot Photo Manager, though it errors out when I launch it (no big deal – it probably has other dependencies which are not yet installed). I’m looking forward to trying out the new system when it’s done installing and I’m hoping that this upgrade didn’t break my X11 or otherwise jack my box.

Last night, Nicole needed to back up some important work documents on her Windows laptop. This seemed like a good time to look into iFolder, but I quickly noticed that they don’t offer .deb packages and the instructions for building and installing on Dapper looked like a bit of a nightmare.

Instead, I ended up setting up a Samba share for her on my Linux box. Samba seems to have a reputation for being a beast to configure, but I knew that Ubuntu came installed with Samba and GNOME has a “Shared Folders” panel that offers sharing via SMB. It wasn’t too bad, once I figured out that I needed to create a Samba user and password via the smbpasswd command (I didn’t see a way to do this in the GUI).

Now I’d like to set up an automated backup for her – I’m thinking that I’ll probably create a cron job for her in Cygwin.