VMware, Ubuntu 6.10 & USB flash drives

Before Ubuntu 6.10, I had no problems to access USB flash drives from Windows running under VMware (guest system) with Ubuntu as a host system.

And then Ubuntu 6.10 came and the problems came, too. Sometimes, when I plugged the drive, Windows detected it and I could access the data on it (rarely) and sometimes Windows didn't detect it at all or did detect it but there was no access to the data (usually). And I could see no pattern in this behaviour.

After a few months I finally found this article 3862823 in the VMTN Knowledge Base - USB Devices Are Not Available on Some Linux hosts, the VM > Removable Devices > USB Devices Menu Is Empty.

Adding the following line:
  usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0
to the /etc/fstab file solved the problem.

How to install VMware Tools in VMware Player

After creating a 'new' virtual machine I noticed that I couldn't do a few things that I could do in the other VM (the one that served as a base when creating a 'new' one):

• I could not move the mouse between the guest system and the host system. Each time I wanted to move from one OS to another, I had to click to grab input and press Crtl+Alt to release it.
• I could not use the toolbar at the top of the VMware Player without leaving the guest system.
• I could not use the guest system in fullscreen mode.
• I could not change the size of the guest system (in a way similar to changing screen resolution) by simply resizing the VMware Player window.

After a short while I realized that the difference between these two virtual machine was the fact that VMware Tools were installed in the old one, but not in the new one.

I installed VMware Tools and it solved all the problems.

This article explains how to install VMware Tools in VWware Player.

How to create a 'new' virtual machine using only VMware Player

Well, not exactly new, hence the quotation marks.

But if you:

• already have a virtual machine,
• need a new one with another operating system, but do not need another configuration for this new machine (for example, smaller or bigger HDD),

you can simply:

• make a copy of the existing virtual machine's folder,
• run the machine from the new location,
• put an installation CD of the new operating system and change the booting device to CD-ROM.

Quick and dirty method, but it works - I installed an evaluation copy of Windows Server 2003 this way.

And if you have more time, you may find these articles interesting:
  VMX-builder
  How-to: VMware player modification
  How to create virtual machines using VMware Player

Installing VMware Workstation on Ubuntu

When installing VMware on Ubuntu (and other Linux distros too, I think) from a compressed tar archive (for example, VMware-workstation-5.5.0-18463.tar.gz), make sure to change the directory to the root of an unpacked tarball, so you can start the installation by typing ./vmware-install.pl. Otherwise, the setup process will fail.

I had a problem installing VMware 5.5.0 and I found the solution here.