Monday, October 24, 2005

VMware Player "hacked"

A few days ago VMWare released "VMWare Player" which can run virtual machines but cannot create them.
Today I saw this how-to on hackaday.
I just installed Ubuntu and it works great!

Here is my modified how-to:
  • install the VMWare Player
  • download the "Browser Appliance" virtual machine
  • make a test run of the virtual machine to verify that it works
  • download the Ubuntu CD-Image
  • replace these two lines in the file "Browser-Appliance.vmx":

    ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
    ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

    by these:

    ide1:0.fileName= "ubuntu-5.10-install-i386.iso"
    ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

  • start the virtual machine and press ctrl-g to direct the
    input to the virtual machine
  • press escape and boot from cd-rom
  • install ubuntu
  • revert the changes made above
  • done (you may want to delete the iso which you don't need
    anymore)