Windows 8 What VMware Player?

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

I'm still interested in running Ubuntu in a Virtual Machine.
What free VM software do people use.

I'd pay for VMware Player if I was sure it would work but after my experience with Virtual Machine I'd like to actually try it out before I buy it.

Mike

I just found that there is a free version of VMware Player, so I'm going to give that a try.

Back again....

I installed VMware Player, and I installed the latest version of Ubuntu in it.
I'm logged into the forum from it right now.

Much easier then Virtual Machine, it only took a few minutes.

 

[Joe S]

I gave up on Virtualbox years ago. It was a royal pain to network then. You had to setup a bridged network manually and manually assign addresses, change firewall settings, etc. I also found VMware much better.
Joe

 

[strollin]

I'm posting this from Ubuntu 14.04 running in VirtualBox on my laptop running Win 8.1. Seems to work pretty well for me. I don't recall having any issues when setting up this VM.

For the most part, either is a capable virtualization platform. However, VMWare Player doesn't support things like snapshots which VirtualBox does. You need to upgrade to the full VMWare product to be able to do snapshots.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

I have a question.

When I normally run Ubuntu I boot to it from a DVD.
This allows me to access everything on my computer.

Now that it's in a Virtual Machine it doesn't see my drives and the rest of the computer.
So I can't copy images or anything from my hard drives to the Ubuntu install.

It does see my DVD drives and USB connections.

I assume this is because when it's in Virtual mode the virtual drive is all there is as far as Ubuntu is concerned.
Is this right?

This greatly limits the usage, for me.

Is there a way to make it see the other hard drives?
I have 4.

I should probably ask this on the Ubuntu forum but I installed Chrome in it, the process completed and it said that Chrome was installed but I can't find an icon anyplace?

Mike

 

[Joe S]

Look through the network options and think of the VM as a separate machine. I connect with bridged mode there is also ICS and other options.
Joe

 

[ussnorway]

I don’t use the free player Mike but the vmworkstation has a couple of options;
1. To connect files between two windows systems (ie. The host machine and the virtual satellite) can share a folder… map the drive in the same way any other windows networked machines can.
2. If you install vmtools then the two can read each others clipboards i.e. copy and paste… Ubuntu can read a windows file so this tends to be a good option for quick transfer of small files.
3. Advanced users can mount a physical harddrive into the virtual machine… hyper-v is better at doing this but its not that much harder in vmware.

Note; you can mount the entire drive or just a partition… again Ubuntu reads windows hardware better than most and certainly better than windows reads linux drives.

I strongly recommend putting a tick in the independent box when mounting any physical hardware so that snapshots don’t corrupt your data… snapshots are a great thing but not when two machines have to share the same drive.

p.s. windows 7 can also mount v-drives of vhd or vhdx in the same way that 8 and 8.1 can but that gets a bit risky and wouldn’t help much with Linux drives in any event.

Pps. two notes on resources;
1. vmware (with tools installed) needs about a gig of the host machines ram and by default will place the v-page files on the drive it is installed on. Best practice is to install onto a non-system drive i.e not the c drive.
2. Ime mounting the drive the vmware is physically installed on will cause issues if the host is windows 7 but they appear to have fixed this restriction in 8.

 

[whs]

Mike, here is how I install Linux in VMware Player. The example is for Mint but the Ubuntu installation would be exactly the same. There may be only different commands for the tools installation. But try the Mint ones first - maybe they work. Tutorial is here.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

Thanks for the info, whs.
I have Ubuntu installed now and it seems to work well.

I'll look at your suggestions ussnorway.

I'll mess around with it and see what it can and can't do.

Mike

 

[whs]

Here is another interesting way you could install Ubuntu. That one is a lot of fun. Ckeck out the demo video I made from that installation.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi whs

Thanks I'll check it out.
That may be more what I want then in a VM.

I usually run it from a DVD that lets me access everything and boot to it without starting Windows, but that won't let you make permanent changes to it since it's running from an unwritable source.
Maybe with a USB stick I will run more like an installation.

Mike

 

[whs]

Maybe with a USB stick I will run more like an installation.

If you do it as explained in the tutorial (define the 4GB persistent storage), then it is like any installation on an internal disk. And if you define the data partition, then you have plenty of space to store data and the persistent storage will be reserved for installing [rograms.

The version I show in the video has many programs installed - e.g. the program with which I made the screen recording. It is called: RecordMyDesktop

The only additional advice I can give is to use USB3 and a stick with a short access time (1ms or better). Slower sticks and USB2 will work, but it is no fun because it is really slow.