tOMPSON’s blog

Lately I had troubles with my Debian Etch installation running in a VMWare server on a Windows 2003 SBS. I had to reboot the guest system multiple times until the eth0 network interface could establish a connection. It seems that this hat something to do with the system choosing the wrong of to network modules.

On startup the pcnet32 and the vmxnet modules where loaded (which I could see in /var/log/messages and with lsmod). I tried to change /etc/modules.conf by adding alias eth0 vmxnet or alias eth0 pcnet32 but that did not help.

Based on these two sites I tried to add EthernetX.virtualDev = vmxnet (I set X to 0 for the first and only network interface) in the .vmx file of the virtual machine and then to add the alias eth0 vmxnet in /etc/modules.conf - and that did the trick.

because I can not remember when I really needed it the last time. Most of the time I press it accidentally and get into troubles.

A quick web search brought up this page describing how to disable the Caps Lock on various systems and links to annoyances.org for more information. I chose the first method by downloading the registry key and adding it to my system.

I already posted a while ago that I had problems with the clock speed of my notebook and vmware guest systems. There are a lot of online resources about this problem. They state out that the power saving features of mobile processors could cause troubles in clock synchronization between host and guest systems.

There are additional articles in the vmware knowledge base about Configuring Virtual Machines to Run on a Laptop Host Computer. They all discuss the problems with Intel SpeedStep and CPU clock timing.

After applying the settings for the time stamp counters from the articles I did not get better results. I was wondering because I remembered running virtual machines on my notebook without a problem.

I tried to update the BIOS of my notebook to the newest version and after rebooting everything worked fine. It did not matter if I tried a Windows or Linux guest system - the clock was synchronized. Two days later I used the virtual machine again - and the problem was there again:

I tried all tips stated out in knowledge base article 928, 1236 and 2039 but nothing worked. I found out that after putting my notebook into hibernate and starting it again the clock synchronization does not work anymore. When I do a complete reboot everything works fine again.

Microsoft now provides all of its Internet Explorer versions in separate downloadable virtual PC images. This is extremely useful for web developers because it allows them to test their applications for compatibility.

Today I had a problem with my Ubuntu system running in a VMware Workstation on my notebook. First I noticed that every key I pressed occurred multiple times. Then the screensaver appeared very often after a short period of time. I looked for the reason and found out that the clock of the guest system ran way to fast.

A quick web search told me that I am not the only one with this problem. I found this article in the VMware knowledge base. After following the directives in the solution part everything worked fine again. I had to reboot because I could not find the VMware Registration Service in my services.

It seems that this problem occurs on notebooks because of their power saving mechanisms. VMware is not able to find out the correct CPU clock speed for the virtual CPU because the host is constantly changing the CPU frequency.

UPDATE: Today I found out that I still had problems with the changing CPU clock speeds. I downloaded the RMClock Utility to observe the CPU clock frequency on my host system. By selecting another power scheme in the Windows XP control panel I was able to control that.

Nearly a year ago I stumbled upon a post on lifehacker about Launchy. I downloaded, installed and used the tool - and I had to blog about it.

Now for everybody who does not know it until know: I love Launchy! It is THE tool that improved my whole using-a-PC-experience to most in the last year (next to using Google Reader).

Launchy creates an search index of all the shortcuts on your PC so you can start any application by pressing ALT+Space and entering a part of its name. It is also possible to open web bookmarks and do calculations. You may even extend its functionality with plugins.

It increases the speed of working with Windows a lot because you do not have to get your hands of the keyboard just to open an application.