VMWare tools on Fedora Core 5

[Mike A. Harris]

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 14:17 -0600, William Lovaton wrote:
> 
>>I've been doing some testing of RawHide on a virutal
>>machine I configured a few days ago with VMWare 5.5.1
>>build-19175.  Every thing is working fine except that
>>I can't install the VMWare tools on the guess
>>operating system to improve performance and imrpove
>>the display settings so I can use a decent resolution,
>>right now am stuck with 800 x 600.
>>
>>Any idea about how to install the VMWare tools on FC5
>>guess OS?  when I try to do it gnome-volume-manager
>>crashes and it doesn't do anything, any attempt to
>>restart g-v-m results in a immediate crash.  The only
>>way to fix it is to cancel the installation of the
>>VMWare tools and then g-v-m can be started normally
>>again.
>>
>>I hope it can be done because that performance gain
>>would be great, all in all I am very impressed with
>>FC5 performance.
> 
> 
> VMware doesn't provide a driver for X.org 7.0. It isn't needed though,
> as X.org already contains a FOSS driver for the VMware video card; you
> just need to select a better monitor in the Display properties.

Actually, VMware Inc. maintains the 'vmware' video driver that
is in X.Org.  It is the official X 'vmware' driver.  If users
have problems with this driver, please report them to X.Org
bugzilla in the proper component, so that the VMware Inc.
engineer(s) who maintain the driver are aware of the problem.

The VMware guys have done a good job of maintaining the driver,
and commit changes to CVS on a frequent enough basis that I'd
consider it to be well maintained personally.

The VMware software probably includes a vmware X driver also,
as all users out there may or may not have the latest driver
for a given X release, and they probably prefer it if users
use the latest driver than perhaps an older one that came with
their OS which may not have the latest bug fixes and features,
etc.

For Fedora users, I would recommend using the driver that ships
with Fedora, and filing bugs in Xorg bugzilla if problems arise.
If there are bugs in the driver, we can always patch it to be
on par with whatever the driver is that vmware ships with their
product, as it is the same driver as is in CVS head as far as
I am aware.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Mike A. Harris, Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
Proud to be Canadian.