VMWare woes

I had some recent involvement with a project that pretty much required that we work in Linux. This meant trying to find a good linux solution for my laptop. After a bit of research I decided that VMWare looked like a good option. Maybe I’m asking too much but at this point in time I just don’t feel like debugging the OS. I just want to get on with things. The problem with the Linux distros that I’d tried up to that point is that they’d always leave some part of my laptop in some dysfunctional state. The best of the best for laptops was touted as being SUSE. I had 9.3 installed but then I had no wireless internet. The really cool thing is that VMWare was going to solve all of these device management problems for me. The other very cool thing was that I could move an vmware image from one machine to another. This ability to move the environment from one machine to another is a dream. Unfortunately, it is just that, a dream. I was able to move images from one machine to another and I was able to start them and even work with them. So that part of the dream was real. However the problems started showing up when I needed to be working in Windows. First problem, it would appear that the vmware install fiddles with your network and disk drivers. I say this because all of a sudden Thunderbird started losing messages and corrupting folders. My chat client Trillian stopped working altogether but only on my nc6000 laptop. The strange thing is, Trillian worked perfectly ok on my desktop. The problems on that machine only started to appear when I was copying some pictures for a friend. The cd burning process created a disk and then Windows complained that it wasn’t able to complete the task and the disk wasn’t good though my iBook didn’t complain about the disk. I got the same problem on my laptop. Ok, I spent some time checking out an interesting product and it didn’t work for me in my situation. A quick un-install and…. oh my gosh….. the un-install process for VMWare is to re-install Windows! So, after managing to keep Windows reasonably functional on my laptop for about two years, I was forced to re-install because a product not only corrupted my machines, it failed to be able to restore it to a previous state. It is pretty understandable that VMWare would have to adjust the drivers in order to function. However one would think that because they are affecting Windows to the degree that they are that they’d be a bit more careful in what they modify and keeping the old stuff about so that there is a possibility of rolling back. FYI, the final solution was to install Ubuntu and so far I’d classify it as a weeble. It wobbles a bit but it certainly doesn’t fall down. However certianly has had a different experience.

tags: ubuntu  vmware