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louyo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Intall of 6.5 on Hardy Heron, be afraid, be very afraid

Install went OK, but Full Screen mode is unusable (the bar with the menu loses all the lettering) and dual monitors still won't work. In fact, after trying it, the whole window breaks up. I think 6.04 was much better, I will have to go back. I am very disappointed in this release. All the stuff that didn't work right for me in the BETA got worse. The only positive I see is Unity and I don't have much use for it.

Blah.

Smiley Sad

Lou

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louyo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Went back to 6.0.5 and it resolved my full screen and dual monitor problems. Dual monitor in guests is still quite fragile but works OK.

Probably documented somewhere but if you installed this thing from the bundle, you need to uninstall with the bundle. Just run the bundle again, it will uninstall and then you can cancel when it asks if you really want to install. Glad they have an archive of older releases.

Lou

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Frankly I'm surprised this is worse and not the same as 6.0.x. I've actually been using/developing on Hardy Heron without major problems. Though I should point out that you really need Metacity for it to work smoothly.

The fullscreen/multimon situation is sort of a complicated one. Basically, we need to do something that no other app does, and therefore no window managers nor the EMWH window manager spec allowed for.

Our method for doing fullscreen/multi-mon relied on tricking the window manager into giving us a maximized window across multiple monitors, which most window managers try hard not to allow. As such, this doesn't always work reliably and is subject to problems based on the configuration.

We've been working with the EMWH spec maintainers on a standard for doing this and I'm happy to say that after many months it's now in the spec. We'll be spending some time patching window managers to support our new fullscreen multi-mon hint, which should make this all work smoothly in a future release.

In the meantime, I'm sorry for your problems, but we do have a solid plan for improving this situation. We all want multimon to work well for our installs too Smiley Happy

Christian

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louyo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Thanks for the reply,

>>Though I should point out that you really need Metacity for it to work smoothly.

AFAIK, you get Metacity when you run Gnome, which is what I am using. Do I need to configure something special?

Lou

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Yeah, though newer distros are shipping Compiz as an optional WM these days, Hardy included. If you enable 3D effects, you're no longer running Compiz, and Compiz doesn't really work with our fullscreen/multi-mon hack.

You shouldn't need anything special if you are running Metacity. Our fullscreen hack requires Metacity, but it's possible that some versions of Metacity won't work well, or that some panel setups or multihead setups will break things. Again, I'm a little surprised that 6.0.x works but 6.5 does not, as I didn't think we changed that code, but it's possible something subtle broke for certain configurations. It is working on my Hardy setup with Metacity right now. I'll see about getting some other people here to reproduce the issue.

Christian

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Sloppyunderfoot
Contributor
Contributor

Since you guys seem to have a great working knowledge of VMWare on Ubuntu, I thought I'd ask my question to see if you might be able to steer me in the right direction. I installed VMware 6.05 two days ago on Hardy Heron. Intially, I added OpenSuse10.3 as a guest os however, was unable to load VMtools after it booted. Today, I added Mandriva2008 as a guest and actually am running Firefox through it and typing this however, I'm running into the same situation - unable to load VMtools. VMware loaded smoothly on my computer. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks

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louyo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

>>unable to load VMtools

Could you be a little more descriptive of the problem? What errors do you get?

For Linux VM's, I usually use the tarball for installation, step by step instructions are in the VMWare WS users guide. You need to make sure you install the development packages and kernel sources in the VM so VMWare tools setup can do a compile. If you search on here for your VM's distro (like SUSE) and tools, you should see several threads and one should match the symptoms you are getting.

Again, the users manual does a nice job of describing the process... (not intended to be an RTFM response) Smiley Happy

Post your error messages and maybe we can help. You might want to consider a new thread with a description of your problem so more folks can chime in.

Lou

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Sloppyunderfoot
Contributor
Contributor

Louyo, thanks much for your response. The interesting thing is that I do not get any error messages. When I go to VM and select install vmtools I never see any "activity" nor there is never any indication that the vmtools loaded. After I push the button to install vmtools and then click on VM - I do see the possibility to "cancel vmtools install". That's it. I'll take your advice and post this elsewhere. I'm going to work and will just leave this running on the off chance that vmtools will load. Perhaps, I'm simply not giving it time enough? Thanks

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louyo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

>>When I go to VM and select install vmtools I never see any "activity" nor there is never any indication that the vmtools loaded.

No, all that does is mount the tools CDROM so you can do the install. On Windows VM's, the autorun stuff handles it. If you go to your CDROM place, you will see an RPM file and a tar file. You can install either way. Again, for a detailed description, see the users guide.

I prefer the tar method but RPM is OK as long as you run the config program afterwards. For the tar version, make sure you run it as root.

Lou

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Sloppyunderfoot
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks again for your response. I downloaded this as an eval from VMware's webpage and when I installed I believe I only ran vmware-install.pl and don't recall seeing the rpm or tar file. Perhaps I can download them elsewhere.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

The RPM and tarball get mounted in the guest when you click on "Instal Tools" in the Workstation menu. You don't need to download them.

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