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If you’re using VMWare on a variable-speed processor (like all most modern cpu’s these days) you might have noticed that sometimes the guest OS runs a lot faster (causing the guest clock to run faster and all kinds of weird effects).

The fix for that is easy, and specified in this knowledgebase article:

Add to /etc/vmware/config the following lines:

host.cpukHz = 1700000
host.noTSC = TRUE
ptsc.noTSC = TRUE


replacing 1700000 with the actual top speed of your processor. Et voila, runs better ;)

I just installed VMWare server on my gf’s linux-laptop, but the server console didn’t want to start for some reason… Just came back to the command line, nothing happening.

Running vmware as
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libdbus-1.so.3:$LD_PRELOAD vmware made things work, strangely enough ;)

Guess it’s because she’s not running any dbus-aware windowmanager, and thus said library not being loaded before the start of the server console. Ah well, fixed now ;)

If you’re rolling your own kernels, and upgraded to 2.6.22, you might have bumped into a compilation issue:

…
include/asm/page.h: In function ‘pte_t native_make_pte(long unsigned int)’:
include/asm/page.h:112: error: expected primary-expression before ‘)’ token
include/asm/page.h:112: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘{’ token
include/asm/page.h:112: error: expected primary-expression before ‘.’ token
include/asm/page.h:112: error: expected `;’ before ‘}’ token
…

How to fix this:

1. Download the vmware-any-any-update110.tar.gz update. Unpack in /tmp
2. Go into the vmware-any-any-update110 directory, and untar the vmmon.tar file (tar xvf vmmon.tar)
3. Execute the following command:
   sed -i ’s!# include !!g’ vmmon-only/common/hostKernel.h
4. Re-tar vmmon.tar (tar cvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only)
5. run runme.pl

And you’re done!

Thanks to the Gentoo bug tracker and all persons posting on it for the ‘fix’.

As per always, if it eats your cat, it’s not my fault nor my problem! ;)

Edit: vmware-any-any-update112.tar.gz has been released meanwhile, which solves the above problem too.