Microsoft Virtual Server Clock Issue: Clock Skew Detected (Linux VM)
I ran into a weird little issue today on a CentOS 4.5 virtual machine running under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. I had configured and compiled Ruby 1.8.6 Patchlevel 110 and su-ed to root to perform a make install. However, I kept getting a make: warning: Clock skew detected. Your build may be incomplete message after a couple of tries. A bit of searching indicated that the clock skew message was what it sound like: A processor related timing issue. Linux VMs tend to have issues with clocks running slow. So, I brought up system-config-time to have it force the clock to sync with an external source. Performing a make install after that resulted in an error free installation.
Puppy Linux 3.01 Makes an Old Notebook Useful Again
I have an old Dell Latitude L400 notebook in my office that I've used to test various Linux distros over the years. However, while 256MB RAM and 10GB hard drive space seemed like a lot back in 2001 or so, it is a bit on the small size for many current distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.). So, I decided to give Puppy Linux 3.01 a try.
The installation was quick and painless. Pay attention to the dialog boxes as they appear though. One advises to install Grub on the MBR instead of the dialog box suggested area. This is what worked for me.
The only problem for me was the usual one when installing Linux on a notebook: Wireless LAN configuration. Puppy Linux saw the inserted 802.11b WiFi card. And, I was able to enter in the required configuration information. But, after repeated tries is did not connect to either of two wireless access points in my test area. Fortunately, the wired Ethernet connection went painlessly and I was on the network.
The notebook is responding very nicely for an old Pentium III 700MHz box with 256MB RAM. It probably boots faster than any other notebook I have running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X. The 7-year old notebook went from a clunker to a useful tool again after installing Puppy Linux.
VMware Tools and Fedora 8
VMware Worsktation 6's WMware Tools provides both binary RPM and a source code level tar.gz installation files. The RPM installation doesn't work with Fedora 8 (Linux) because it isn't recognized in its list. The code extracted from the tar.gz file (a Perl installation script) doesn't recognize Fedora 8 either. However, it offers the option of compiling the source code for the unrecognized Linux distro. This seems to result in a functional VMware Tools installation. At least VMW6 reports VMware Tools installed successfully in the bottom border after rebooting Fedora 8.
VMware Workstation 6 VMs Not Compatible with ESX and Fusion?
I only started using VMware Fusion (for the Mac) and VMware Workstation for Windows a few months ago. While building a virtual machine for the recently released Fedora 8 (Linux) using VMware Worsktation 6 for Windows, I noticed that the compatibility boxes for Fusion and ESX were grayed out. However, if I changed the VM format to VMware Workstation 5, Fusion and ESX were shown as compatible.
Several years ago I noticed that VMware Workstation 5 list compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 but ESX 2.5 did not. I guess there are still relatively larger differences in how VMware Workstation works with various Guest OSes compared to ESX and, now, Fusion.