Technology Tales

Shared folders not automounting on an Ubuntu 18.04 guest in a VirtualBox virtual machine

Over the weekend, I finally got to resolve a problem that has affected Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine for quite a while. The usual checks on Guest Additions installation and vboxsf group access assignment were performed but were not causing the issue. Also, no other VM (Windows (7 & 10) and Linux Mint Debian Edition) on the same Linux Mint 19.2 machine was experiencing the same issue. The latter observation made the problem intrinsic to the Ubuntu VM itself.

Because I install the Guest Additions software from the included virtual CD, I executed the following command to open the relevant file for editing:

sudo systemctl edit --full vboxadd-service

If I had installed virtualbox-guest-dkms and virtualbox-guest-utils from the Ubuntu repositories instead, then this would have been the command that I needed to execute instead of the above.

sudo systemctl edit --full virtualbox-guest-utils

Whichever configuration gets opened, the line that needs attention is the one beginning with "Conflicts" (line 6 in the file on my system). The required edit removes systemd-timesync.service from the list following the equals sign. It is worth checking that file paths include the correct version number for the Guest Additions software that is installed, in case this is not how things are. The only change that was needed on my Ubuntu VM was to the Conflicts line, and rebooting it got the Shared Folder automatically mounted under the /media directory as expected.

Moving a Windows 7 VM from VirtualBox to VMware Player

Seeing how well Windows 8 was running in a VMware Player virtual machine and that was without installing VMware Tools in the guest operating system, I was reminded about how sluggish my Windows 7 VirtualBox VM had become. Therefore, I decided to try a migration of the VM from VirtualBox to VMware. My hope was this: it would be as easy as exporting to an OVA file (File > Export Appliance... in VirtualBox) and importing that into VMware (File > Open a VM in Player). However, even selecting OVF compatibility was insufficient for achieving this, and the size of the virtual disks meant that the export took a while to run as well. The solution was to create a new VM in VirtualBox from the OVA file and use the newly created VMDK files with VMware. That worked successfully to give me a speedier, more responsive Windows 7 VM for my pains.

Access to host directories needed reinstatement using a combination of the VMware Shared Folders feature and updating drive mappings in Windows 7 itself to use what appeared to it as network drives in the Shared Folders directory on the \\vmware-host domain. For that to work, VMware Tools needed to be installed in the guest OS (go to Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools to make available a virtual CD from which the installation can be done) as I discovered when trying the same thing with my Windows 8 VM, where I dare not instate VMware Tools due to their causing trouble when I last attempted it.

Moving virtual machine software brought about its side effects, though. Software like Windows 7 detects that it's on different hardware, so reactivation can be needed. While Windows 7 reactivation was a painless online affair, it wasn't the same for Photoshop CS5. That meant that I needed help from Adobe's technical support people top get past the number of PC's for which the software already had been activated. In hindsight, deactivation should have been done before the move, but that's a lesson that I know well now. Technical support sorted my predicament politely and efficiently while reinforcing the aforementioned learning point. Moving virtual machine platform is very like moving from one PC to the next, and it hadn't clicked with me quite how real those virtual machines can be when it comes to software licensing.

Apart from that and figuring out how to do it, the move went smoothly. An upgrade to the graphics driver on the host system and getting Windows 7 to recheck the capabilities of the virtual machine even gained me a fuller Aero experience than I had before then. Full screen operation is quite reasonable too (the CTRL + ALT + ENTER activates and deactivates it) and photo editing now feels less boxed in too.

Removing VMware Player from Linux Mint Debian Edition

A whole slew of updates has appeared for my Linux Mint Debian Edition PC. However, to instate them, I needed to remove VMware Player and this is the command to do so:

sudo vmware-installer -u vmware-player

It worked in my case, and my system updates are in progress as I write this. The same command should work for other Linux distros where VMware Player was installed using the *.bundle installer. VMware Player remains in place on my main PC though, so I am not ditching it just yet, even if I have to be careful when running it on Linux Mint 13 so as not to freeze the system on myself.

Installing VMware Player 4.04 on Linux Mint 13

Curiosity about the Release Preview of Windows 8 saw me running into bother when trying to see what it's like in a VirtualBox VM. While doing some investigations on the web, I saw VMware Player being suggested as an alternative. Before discovering VirtualBox, I did have a licence for VMware Workstation and was interested in seeing what Player would have to offer. The, it was limited to running virtual machines that were created using Workstation. Now, it can create and manage them itself and without any need to pay for the tool either. Registration on VMware's website is a must for downloading it, though, but that's no monetary cost.

Once I had downloaded Player from the website, I needed to install it on my machine. There are Linux and Windows versions; it was the former that I needed, and there are 32-bit and 64-bit variants, so you need to know what your system is running. With the file downloaded, you need to set it as executable and the following command should do the trick once you are in the right directory:

chmod +x VMware-Player-4.0.4-744019.i386.bundle

Then, it needs execution as a superuser. With sudo access for my user account, it was a matter of issuing the following command and working through the installation screens to instate the Player software on the system:

sudo ./VMware-Player-4.0.4-744019.i386.bundle

Those screens proved easy for me to follow, so life would have been good if that were all that was needed to get Player working on my PC. Having Linux Mint 13 means that the kernel is of the 3,2 stock and that means using a patch to finish off the Player installation because the required VMware kernel modules seem to silently fail to compile during the installation process. This only manifests itself when you attempt to start VMware Player afterwards to find a module installation screen appear. That wouldn't be an issue of itself were it not for the compilation failure of the vmnet module and subsequent inability to start VMware services on the machine. There is a prompt to peer into the log file for the operation, and that is a little uninformative for the non-specialist.

Rummaging around the web brought me to the requisite patch, and it works for Player 4.0.3 and Workstation 8.0.2 by default. Doing some tweaking allowed me to make it work for Player 4.04 too. My first step was to extract the contents of the tarball to /tmp where I could edit patch-modules_3.2.0.sh. Line 8 was changed to the following:

plreqver=4.0.4

With the amendment saved, it was time to execute the shell script as a superuser, having made it executable beforehand. This can be accomplished using the following command:

chmod +x patch-modules_3.2.0.sh && sudo ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh

With that completed successfully, VMware Player ran as it should. An installation of Windows 8 into a new VM ran very smoothly, and I was impressed with the performance and responsiveness of the operating system within a Player VM. There are a few caveats, though. First, it doesn't run at all well with VMware Tools, so it's best to leave them uninstalled since it doesn't seem to need them either; it was possible to set the resolution to the same as my screen and use the CTRL+ALT+ENTER shortcut to drop in and out of full screen mode anyway. Second, the unattended Windows installation wasn't the way forward for setting up the VM, but it was no big deal to have that experiment thwarted. The feature remains an interesting one, though.

With Windows 8 running so well in Player, I was reminded of the sluggish nature of my Windows 7 VM and an issue with a Fedora 17 one too. The result was that I migrated the Windows 7 VM from VirtualBox to VMware, and all is so much more responsive. Getting it there took not a little tinkering, so that's a story for another entry. Based on my experiences so far, I reckon that VMware Player will remain useful to me for a little while yet. Resolving the installation difficulty was worth that extra effort.

Getting VirtualBox working on Ubuntu after a kernel upgrade

In previous posts, I have talked about getting VMware Workstation back on its feet again after a kernel upgrade. It also seems that VirtualBox is prone to the same sort of affliction. However, while VMware Workstation fails to start at all, VirtualBox at least starts itself even if it cannot get a virtual machine going and generates errors instead.

My usual course of action is to fire up Synaptic and install the drivers for the relevant kernel. Looking for virtualbox-ose-modules-[kernel version and type] and installing that usually resolves the problem. For example, at the time of writing, the latest file available for my system would be virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-19-generic.  If you are a command line fan, the command for this would be:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-19-generic

The next thing to do would be to issue the command to start the vboxdrv service, and you'd be all set:

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv start

There is one point of weakness (an Achilles heel, if you like) with all of this: the relevant modules need to be available in the first place and I hit a glitch after updating the kernel to 2.6.24-20 when they weren't; I do wonder why Canonical fail to keep both in step with one another and why the new kernel modules don't come through the updates automatically either. However, there is a way around this too. That means installing virtualbox-ose-source via either Synaptic or the command line:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-source

The subsequent steps involve issuing more commands to perform a reinstallation from the source code:

sudo m-a prepare

sudo m-a auto-install virtualbox-ose

Once these are complete, the next is to start the vbox drv as described earlier and to add yourself to the vboxusers group if you're still having trouble:

sudo adduser [your username] vboxusers

The source code installation option certainly got me up and running again, and I'll be keeping it on hand for use should the situation raise its head once more.

Disk corruption can be virtual too

It's the sort of sight that causes you to fear the worst, an unchanging black screen with a flashing cursor. That was what started to greet me recently when I tried to fire up a Windows XP guest in VMware Workstation. The cause was the corruption of a virtual disk, an ominous thing that affected a supplemental virtual hard drive that I had added to the virtual machine rather than its main one. Though there might have been some data on there, it was nothing that I didn't have elsewhere anyway. Removing the broken disk from the XP VM returned the situation to fuller health, and I simply tried creating a new one again. So far, this seems to be working fine, yet I'll be keeping a watchful eye on things.

So far, I have no idea why the corruption happened, but the broken disk files were created without a VMDK extension, which might indicate that something was amiss with the process that created them. While it would be better if VMware highlighted the state of its virtual disks, it was when I tried opening the trashed disk with VirtualBox that a warning was given and VMware did the same when I tried it with that afterwards (opening VMware virtual disks with VirtualBox is possible, but you need to ensure that no attempt at importation is made, or you could end up with a breakage). While I may have discovered the fault in a roundabout manner, it's better to know what's gone wrong than not to know at all.

Watch where you store your virtual machines when using VMware on Linux

My experience is with Ubuntu on this one, but I have found that you need to be careful as regards the file system used by the drive where you keep your virtual machines. If it is NTFS, VMware can fail to start a VM because it cannot create a virtual memory file while it presents as physical memory to a guest operating system. Use ext2 or ext3 and there should be no problem, even if that means formatting a drive to fulfil the need. That's what I did and all was well thereafter.

VMware Workstation in full screen mode hobbles my keyboard

Recently, I have encountered an odd situation following my recent upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04: when I use VMware Workstation to run Windows XP in full screen mode, the keyboard no longer acts as it should. For instance, the Caps Lock and Num Lock keys stop working, as does the Shift key. Logging out and back in again is the least that's needed to set things right, but there has to be a better way to resolve the problem. While I am not saying that it's limited to the scenario where I saw it happen, it's still very odd behaviour. If you have a solution, please let me know. Of course, I'll keep you posted if I find one. Meanwhile, I'll be avoiding full screen mode with VMware as much as I can.

Update 1:

I have done a spot of digging on this one since and gained the impression that there might be a conflict between VMware and the version of X.org Server that comes with Ubuntu. A restorative trick that I have seen suggested is to issue the following command in a terminal, replacing "gb" with your own locale, but I have yet to see if it works:

setxkbmap -rules xorg -layout "gb"

In any case, it looks as if it is not a permanent fix but just a way to keep working without resorting to system restarts, logging off and back on, etc.

Update 2:

I can now verify that the command quoted above works for me. Of course, it would better to find a permanent fix and even better for the behaviour never to occur at all. For now, though, any fix is better than none whatsoever.

Do I still need serial numbers?

My spot of bad luck with Windows in August highlighted the importance of hanging on to serial numbers for software that I had purchased over the internet and downloaded. Though I could get at the ones that I needed, they were retained in a motley mix of text files and emails; one even was rediscovered by pottering back to the website of the purveyor. While the security of the installation files themselves was another matter of some concern, I was rather more organised in that regard. Both of these are things that need checking before Windows falls to pieces on you and needs to be reinstalled. Of course, human nature, being what it is, means that we often find ourselves picking up the pieces after a calamity has struck when a spot of planning would have made things that bit easier.

Linux does make life easier on this front: commercial applications are anything but the dominant force that they are in the world of Windows. That means that serial numbers are few and far between, and I only need the one for VMware Workstation. The mention of VMware brings me to my retention of Windows, so knowing where serial numbers are located remains a good idea. Even so, I cloned my Windows VM so that any Windows restoration following a destructive crash should be a quicker affair. Now that I am a Linux user, Windows crashes should not encroach as much on my home computing any more and Linux should be more stable anyway...

Setting up openSUSE in VMware Workstation

While it should have been as straightforward as following the instructions on the openSUSE website, a bug in VMware Tools derailed things for me. The usual procedure would have you starting by selecting Install VMware Tools from the VM menu before popping into the virtual machine to do the rest. Once binutils, gcc, gcc-c++, kernel-source and make are in place, the next steps should involve using YaST to install the RPM for you to run the vmware-config-tools.pl script from the terminal.

However, a bug in compat_slab.h puts a stop to any hopes of installing the vmhgfs component. That's needed if you like to enable the shared folders feature; looking in /mnt/hgfs then would get you to any shared folders. While everything else will be there, why miss out on one piece of functionality when it comes in useful?

Having found a useful thread on the subject, here's my way forward: it is as the expected procedure up to the point of installing the RPM. With VMware Tool installation on a Linux guest, you have two options: use RPM as described or use the compressed tarball. The latter seems the better course. Extract the contents into a folder and navigate to that folder. When there, go into vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source and extract the file vmhgfs.tar. Proceed into the resulting vmhgfs-only contained wherever you put it and perform the following edit of compat_slab.h:

Change

#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2, 6, 22) || defined(VMW_KMEMCR_HAS_DTOR)

to

#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE <= KERNEL_VERSION(2, 6, 22) || defined(VMW_KMEMCR_HAS_DTOR)

After that, recreate and replace vmhgfs.tar before issuing the following command in the terminal window while in the vmware-tools-distrib directory: ./vmware-config-tools.pl (anything prefixed with "./" picks up the file from the current working directory rather than where system binaries are stored). Though a kernel compilation will be involved, all the defaults should be sensible. Hopefully, all will work well after this.

Update: I am left with a number of outstanding issues that I need to resolve. Lack of internet access from the VM is one of them, and a constant forgetfulness regarding the nationality of my keyboard (it's British) might be another. In the interim, I have removed VMware tools until I can spend some time setting these to rights. That means internet access has returned, and the British keyboard layout is being interpreted correctly for now...