After being jealous about my girlfriend’s Fusion install on her cute MacOS X, I’m almost happy with VMWare 6.5 beta 1. As you can see on this screenshot, it for example played tricks on each Window that I touched. In the gnome-panel, they all start blinking and don’t stop blinking any more.
Moving Microsoft’s Word window to my second screen was not a very good idea because after I did that, I was unable to move the window any longer. The Window also got a piece of guest-OS desktop-background at the left (of about 150 pixels) and was itself shifted to the right within the window that Unity seems to create for it in X11.
Moving the notepad window over Microsoft’s Word window made Microsoft’s word window stop being redrawn until I activated it. I had to “paint” the Window or changing a piece of text or selecting text to get it back in shape.
Given that Tinne’s Fusion’s Unity feature does actually work perfect, I guess I’m still going to be quite jealous for a few more months. Until, I guess, people like ChipX86 fix all this kind of problems in the beta.
But, it sure looks promising. Cool. etc etc. Sadly is the beta version being ran in debugging mode. Therefore my machine becomes dog slow as soon as I start using VMWare. I hope I can still downgrade to my old VMWare Workstation, because the VMWare tools upgrade has been installing quite a lot of new drivers in the guest Windows OS. Lucky me I have made myself a snapshot before all this.
Proposing to make a snapshot is perhaps something VMWare Workstation could ask its users if it notices that a beta is being started? Just an idea, of course.
If you had use the opensource virtualbox, you would have notice the seamless mode which allow you to do this for quite some time now.
I am not very happy with the whole concept of having to maintain two OSes (costs time and money, so I doubt any company will choose that as a real desktop solution). As I suppose it would be a more cost effective solution, how does Wine compare overall right now for running these few desktop apps ?
VMWare is a pig. Use openbox instead.
http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2008/02/01/how-to-do-seamless-window-integration-with-ubuntu-virtualbox/
I haven’t tried it yet but it definitely looks easier than hassling with VMWare. (awful license issues)
Sorry you hit these problems. It does happen on Metacity at times due to the focus stealing prevention, though I had thought these issues were fixed. I’ll look into it further and try to reproduce it. What version of Metacity are you running?
The issue of moving onto a second screen will go away when we add multi-head support. The shifting issue will also go away.
Beta 1 is certainly not perfect. Consider it more of a technology preview. It’ll rock by the time we finish up the release though :)
I use Fusion on Mac all the time.
Not because I need Windows on a Mac, I’ve got separate machines for that,
but because it’s a great tool to test stuff. Including the Ubuntu Live CD images we deploy for a certain project.
Unity works great, and friends who’ve recently transfered to Mac are using it
as well. Since they already have a non-oem licence for Windows it’s a good solution.
We’re going to deploy a Windows 2008 server soon, so we used Fusion to test our
applications on it. (Yes we have multiple Linux servers, so please don’t burn me for
deploying Windows servers as well, I honestly couldn’t care less about the whole OS flame wars)
If you’re using multiple screens, it gets really nice. Simply put your other OS fullscreen on the second screen and it feels just like a normal computer.
Oh and fusion doesn’t slow down my Mac :-)
VMWare workstation does offer great tools for developers,
currently unavailable in Fusion, but that’s because both products
target a different audience.
I’m another former VMware server user who has switched to VirtualBox. It’s better and it gives you this feature too, though admittedly with some of the same problems (it doesn’t like multihead either).
Again, Virtualbox. It’s even open source now. It does way more than the current VMWare for Linux does.
– Multiple snapshots
– Seamless support (the feature you’re on about)
– Seems faster
Garoth: VMware Workstation has had multiple snapshots for many years now. We’ve also had seamless support for a while in Fusion, it’s just only recently moving into the Workstation product.
@Philip: About debugging: Actually there is a way to disable it, they are just not telling ;) You just have to move lib/bin/vmware-vmx-debug away and make a symlink of the same name to the vmware-vmx file in the same directory.
Thanks a lot for the tip, suka!
That helped a lot indeed.
@Garoth: I tried the procedure to migrate the multi-file vmdk format of my VMWare to vdi files for VirtualBox. After hours of migration work I tried using the seemingly correctly (size was ok, and the all tools returned success too) created disk-file as harddisk in VirtualBox.
Upon boot it told me that there was a disk-sector error, and that I had to press ctrl+alt+del to reboot. I only have one disk in VMWare, although it’s a multi-file vmdk. So the boot sector is on that disk.
So unless VirtualBox makes a tool for this that’ll just always work, I’m unlikely to migrate my Virtual Machines on VMWare to VirtualBox.
But sure it’s cool that there’s an opensource VM with a useful UI that does somewhat integrate correctly within my desktop (so unlike Xen, who are primarily targeted at servers. Which is something me, as a developer, has relatively few interest in).
So for now, I’m going to keep using the software Christian is working on. Although commercial software, it’s one of the few titles in the market that absolutely deserved my money. Simply because I get real value back.