glr,

I'd really like to see a screenshot of this situation. It has to be *really* confused for the pin to be visible in non-fullscreen mode.

I solved it by adding the line below to the .vmx file. The virtual machine starts in the player in fullscreen without the toolbar. Then only drawback is that it reappears if you exit fullscreen mode.

http://www.vmware.com/support/player/doc/releasenotes_player.html

VMware Player does not support the configuration option that sets virtual machines to enter full screen mode after powering on.
This option is set in the configuration (.vmx) file:
gui.fullScreenAtPowerOn = "TRUE"
If this option is set, (for example, because the virtual machine is used in Workstation with this setting), VMware Player enters full screen mode, but the menu and tool bar at the top of the window are not displayed.

Message was edited by:
sleepseeker

Bug or not, It solved the problem, It removed the toolbar.

I am working on trying to make a VMWare player kiosk system, and i have it so that when you log in to the console, X starts, starts the player in full screen, and when you shut down the guest, that it exits to the login prompt. How do i completely disable the Vmware player controls bar so that no user can access it, other than root, or just so that no user can access it. Also, is there any way to disable CTL-ALT? I do not want any user to be able to leave the guest without it exiting to login.

Thanks

The gui.fullScreenAtPowerOn bug will get fixed at some point (it is a bug and has problems as mentioned above) but at the same time there'll likely be a formalized way to get rid of the toolbar that's actually intended to work.

There's currently no way to disable keyboard ungrab (though you can change it to a different key combination than ctrl-alt).

As you can tell, optimizing Player for this kiosk scenario wasn't part of the design at least for the 1.0 version -- we can only do so much at once!

You can set:
[code]
pref.hotkey.shift = "TRUE"
pref.hotkey.control = "TRUE"
pref.hotkey.alt = "TRUE"
[/code]
Set each value to "TRUE" if you want that key to be part of the hotkey combination, "FALSE" if you don't want it to be part of the hotkey combination, or "default" if you don't care whether it's up or down for the purposes of the magic key combination.

Everyone, I figured that some of you may have use for this information. Here is essentially a how-to for the kiosk system.

I use the following to change the keymapping, since ctrl-alt-shift are rarely used together.

In /etc/vmware/config add the following

pref.hotkey.shift = "TRUE"

pref.hotkey.control = "TRUE"

pref.hotkey.alt = "TRUE"

For auto launching and re-launching, this can be done several ways.

First, the Vmware machine should be fully accessible from the user, as in 777 rights.

Then, have following line to the .xinitrc in the users home folder. The only line.

vmplayer -X /path/to/virtual/machine.vmx

this way, when the program is closed, X will exit. The –X makes it start full-screen.

Then, set startx as the users shell. This will make it so that when X exits when the machine is shutdown or the VMPlayer closes, the user will be logged off. Example:

vmtest:x:1001:100:,,,:/home/vmtest:/usr/bin/startx

Now, that being done, you can go several ways. If you want the VM to start up Automatically on computer start up, and to start again when the vm is shut down, but still have local access to the console. i.e. CTRL-ALT-SHIFT, then CTRL-ALT-F1, you would have the following as the last of the consoles that are created. If you don’t want that type of access, have it be the first.

/etc/inittab

c6:12345:respawn:/bin/su - vmtest 38400 tty6 linux

This will auto-login the user on the 6th console, start X, launch Vmware Player, full screen, when the vm is shut down, vmplayer exits, X closes, the user is logged off, the console is re-started, and voila, it starts over.

A different way to do it would be on computer startup, and this is for gentoo linux, I’m not sure with whatever distro you are using, the file is /etc/conf.d/local.start. Add a line of su – vmtest && halt. This will log in, have no console access, start X, load VMware player, start the vm, and on shutdown, shut the machine off completely.

that was considered a bug and they may have fixed it.