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No need for VMware Tools in openSUSE 11.0

Normally, after you have installed your operating system of choice in a VMware virtual machine, you have to install the “VMware Tools” that allow VMware to manage the hardware virtualisation, like interacting with the host system's graphics card. However, there is now an open-source implementation of the VMware Tools (produced by VMware), and it comes with openSUSE 11.0.

Indeed, I thought I had a problem when I couldn't install VMware Tools as I usually would after upgrading my openSUSE virtual machine to from version 10.3 to 11.0. The VMware Tools installer complained that some other package had already installed some of the VMware support files. In the end, the easiest thing is to delete the old VMware tools (if you have it installed from a previous version of openSUSE) and just go with the new “open-vm-tools”. No problems so far.

Sound now working in openSUSE Linux 11.0

I mentioned that, after installing openSUSE 11.0 on my laptop, I found that sound wasn't working. It turns out that there are some bugs with the new 'pulseaudio' audio software that openSUSE uses. In spite of that, after some playing around and searching the Web, I seem to have sound playback working with both speakers and headphones. Skype is also working (so the microphone works too). The things I did were:

• went to “Computer | Control Center”, selected “Sound”, and set all of the drop-downs to their “ALSA” options;

• started the GNOME volume control from the command line using “gnome-volume-control” and used that to set the sound levels;

• in the Skype “Sound Devices” settings, set the “Sound In” to “HDA Intel (hw:Intel,0)” (your own microphone setting may differ from this, but don't set it to “pulse”). Set “Sound Out” and “Ringing” to “pulse”.

Having to start the volume control from the command line was unexpected, but the volume control crashes if you try to open it from the volume control applet, so it's what you have to do. Not ideal, but so much better to have sound working than to have no sound at all.

openSUSE Linux 11.0

I've been using openSUSE Linux 10.3 for a while now. I briefly tried openSUSE 11.0 not long after it came out, but I wasn't convinced that it was stable enough, so I reverted to 10.3. Recently, however, I bought a Mogo Presenter Mouse X54, which is a Bluetooth mouse that slots neatly into the Express Card slot of my HP Pavilion dv2058ea laptop. My thinking was that it should be easy, in this day and age, to get a Bluetooth mouse working with Linux.

At first, I thought I had it working with openSUSE 10.3. It detected the mouse, but I couldn't get it to connect properly. After a bit of Web research, it seemed I probably needed to upgrade the Bluetooth stack, so I downloaded the necessary updates from openSUSE's “GNOME:Community” repository. However, it only seemed to get worse, I couldn't see the mouse at all. In fact, I couldn't detect my laptop's Bluetooth hardware either, so things seemed to be going from bad to worse.

Anyway, I decided to upgrade to 11.0, which promised working Bluetooth connectivity. 11.1 will be out soon, so it seemed reasonable to assume that 11.0 was reasonably stable now. At it turned out, it was a painless upgrade, and my Bluetooth mouse does work now! There was a trick, though. The Bluetooth adapter doesn't seem to start if you have the wireless switch set to the “ on” position when you boot up. You need to switch it on, or off-and-on, after you have logged in.

I do have one issue with 11.0, though. I now have no sound, which means no working Skype. I'm hoping I can resolve this sooner rather than later. Otherwise, I'm happy. Let's hope I can get the sound thing working, though!

Bye-bye Dilbert, hello Reuters

I've changed my mind about having Dilbert on the Web pages for this blog. Instead, I've replaced it with Reuters Market Data News. I still have fond memories of having worked for Reuters, and the financial markets are my business and my interest, so they reflect my interests more than Dilbert does.

VMware Server 2.0

I've mentioned before that I do all of my serious work in VMware virtual machines. This makes it easy for me to move my work between machines, e.g. laptop to/from desktop, or from one PC to its replacement. It's also easy to back-up – you only have a small number of files, and no worries about not having backed up important registry/configuration information.

Recently, I upgraded to VMware Server 2.0. This is a significant change from a user point of view. With VMware Server 1.x, the console for accessing your virtual machines was a VMware-specific GUI based on VNC. With 2.0, the console runs within your Web browser; you can use Firefox or Internet Explorer (the plug-in doesn't work with Opera, unfortunately). The new interface is quite different, but not too hard to get the hang of.

It's a pretty good release; there are no serious problems (at least for what I do), but there are some niggles. For example, it never seems to start up propertly when I start openSUSE 10.3, so I have to run

sudo /etc/init.d/vmware restart

before I can point my browser at

https://localhost:8003/

to access to the new browser-based administration interface. Also, each virtual machine has a “Console” tab which often, when I'm first starting, tells me I don't have permissions to access the console for that virtual machine. I find that by flicking between my two virtual machine console pages, I can get it to allow me access. By the way, the console tab doesn't actually give you an in-browser view of your virtual machine screen, at least not in my setup (openSUSE 10.3 host and Firefox 3 as the browser). Instead, you click in the console tab to get a separate window containing the screen of your virtual machine. It does a reasonable job of resizing the virtual machine's desktop to match the window it is being shown in. VMware Server 1.x could do this for Windows, but I don't remember being able to get it to work for a Linux virtual machine. VMware Server 2.x can resize the screens for both, albeit with a second of so of snowy screen during the resizing.

I also haven't been able to get VMware Server 2.0 to successfully hibernate virtual machines running either Windows XP or openSUSE Linux. That's definitely worse than 1.x; I hope they can get this fixed soon. I don't need to hibernate my virtual machines so much, though, so I can live without it.

All-in-all, I'm happy enough with the upgrade, although to be honest it hasn't added anything helpful to what I do. It's just different, not better.

Opera 9.5

Version 9.5 of the Opera browser (& e-mail client & RSS/Atom feed reader) came out back in June. I mentioned previously that I was waiting on it because of problems I was having with the previous version when running on Linux in a VMware virtual machine. I've been running it for a few months now, with no problems. It was a long time coming; now I have it, I've regained quite a lot of time each day, because I'm not having to restart Opera a hundred times a day (as I genuinely had to some days).

Why do I use Opera, and not a more popular choice like Firefox? I don't want the customisability that people like about Firefox. I want a fast and integrated way to do my on-line communications – read e-mail, browse the Web, and read RSS/Atom feeds. I've tried other software, but nothing I've tried is as fast and convenient as Opera, at least for the things I do and the way I work.