The Virtual Laptop, part 2

I mentioned previously that I had reconfigured my laptop so that all of my actual work would be done in a virtual VMware sessions, either SUSE Linux 10 or Windows XP. I'm hardly the first person in the world to run VMware on a laptop, by the way (a colleague was doing it years ago so he could simulate an Oracle database cluster using multiple virtual sessions). However, I got an honourable mention in the VMTN Blog, which was a bit of a surprise.

So, now that I have had some time to play with my new setup, there are a couple of issues that are worth mentioning. The first issue is that VMware isn't designed with battery-powered computers in mind. I make a habit of running my laptop's battery down to the minimum level almost every day, to keep the battery in peak condition. Sometimes I don't notice when the battery gets to the critical level, and so the laptop automatically hibernates or shuts down. Normally I have my laptop set to hibernate on low power, but what I found was that VMware sessions don't wake up reliably when the VMware host comes out of hibernation.

So, on to plan B, I changed my laptop power settings so that the laptop would shut down on low power. Unfortunately, VMware doesn't cleanly shut down the virtual sessions when it gets a signal to shut down. It just switches the sessions off like the power plug had been pulled out of the socket, with all the disk partition problems that this can produce (indeed, I lost an evening when one such episode corrupted a file that my e-mail client uses).

VMware does provide the vmrun command that you can use to shut down virtual sessions cleanly from the command line; the problem is that I can't find a reliable way to activate it. It has to be called no matter how VMware is shut down, but the GNOME desktop (apparently) doesn't provide support for your own logout/hibernate/shutdown scripts.

So, at the moment I'm stuck. This is a very important issue, but I can't quite see how to get a reliable solution into place. Any suggestions would be very welcome.

The other VMware issue I've come across is around sound. I don't have any problems with sound in my Windows XP session (I can play movies in it quite happily), but in my SUSE Linux session, I had to give up using amaroK, which is a great MP3 player for Linux that is very favourably comparable to iTunes. The problem with using amaroK in a virtual session is that it just skips through each song in a few seconds without playing anything. Clearly there is some issue around sound. A look around the Web showed a number of people suggesting that VMware's Linux sound support is a bit behind the times; I don't know enough about the topic to say, but it is a problem that there are so many different sound subsystems available for Linux. If you are as clueless as me, you end up having to make an uninformed choice, which is always disquieting.

My solution has been to try the new GNOME MP3 player, banshee. The GUI is written in C# (Mono), and is rather basic. There are a lot of features that don't exist yet (like being able to import/export playlists). However, it is based on sound engine called Helix that does a great job of playback. I swear the bass sounded punchier (but don't let me kid you that I did any objective testing). Banshee/Helix also does a good quick job of ripping CDs.

Banshee didn't do a great job of importing my existing MP3 files (didn't get the artist/album details straight), so I've decided to re-rip my CD collection using Banshee. That isn't such a big task, as I don't own more than about 2 days worth of music (I'm not a renowned audiophile like, for example, Tim Bray). Still, I like what I have, and I like to listen to some music using my phone when I'm travelling to and from work, so it won't be a chore.