[596] in athena10
Re: vmplayer
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Fri Oct 31 17:20:50 2008
In-Reply-To: <1225302892.7690.3.camel@balanced-tree>
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Cc: Alex T Prengel <alexp@mit.edu>, athena10@mit.edu
From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:19:35 -0400
To: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
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Before we decide to include vmplayer in Athena 10, I want us to think
it through one more time.
Athena, running on a desktop system, is a useful and sensible
environment for hosting VMs.
Athena 10 will be deployed in that configuration, and so indeed is a
candidate to have the
ability to play VMs in the default software set.
However, Athena 10 is also under consideration by others as,
"Something you package up in
a VM that people could just play." In that use case, you want vmware
tools pre-installed so
you can do things like get proper clock sync, and have the screen
resize properly in the host
environment.
You can EITHER install vmware player OR vmware tools.
Additionally, the vmware tools support under Ubuntu is evolving.
Whereas an RHEL guest can just mount the virtual CD and use RPM to
install the tools with binaries that just work, you have to un-tar a
file, and compile a bunch of stuff under Ubuntu. Both guest
platforms require explicit re-running of vmware-config-tools.pl after
a kernel upgrade. (Although Ubuntu 8.10 intrepid may automate this
piece.)
What would be really nice is a simple switch to toggle between:
"I want this system to host VMs"
and
"I want this system to be a happy VM guest."
The starting point for that toggle could still be a pre-install of
VMware player, I guess.
-Bill
On Oct 29, 2008, at 1:54 PM, Anders Kaseorg wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 13:41 -0400, Alex T Prengel wrote:
>> It would be useful to provide vmplayer in the Athena 10 release as we
>> do now in 9.4. Can we continue to do that?
>
> Intrepid multiverse has a 'make-vmpkg' utility (in the vmware-package
> package) that turns a vmware tarball into a Debian package. It’s
> probably easy to backport make-vmpkg to Hardy.
>
> Anders
>
>
