Sound under VMWare [was: Mouse fix]

Christopher A. Williams chriswfedora at cawllc.com
Thu May 14 13:39:23 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 19:57 -0400, Christopher Beland wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 17:28 -0600, Lawrence E. Graves wrote:
> > No I am not running F11 in my vmware.  I never had these problems before
> > F11.
> 
> OK.  Well, I encourage you to describe the system you are having trouble
> with in your bug report in detail, so package maintainers can figure out
> what's going wrong.

I'm actually having the same issues as Lawrence is. As a VCP+VI3
certified IT architect, I think I can give you just about any technical
detail you need.

First, we are talking specifically about the 64-bit version of VMware
Workstation 6.5.2 running on F11 Preview, with all of the latest
patches. We are also specifically talking about running both Windows and
Linux as guest VMs.

We are specifically NOT talking about running F11 as a guest.

Now... VMware Workstaion 6.5.2 does not run on F11 without a well-known
patch that fixes issues with Workstation running on kernel 2.6.29.
Obviously these patches have been applied because Workstation won't even
compile its modules without doing this.

The issues are:

1) Workstation is unable to recognize any kind of sound device on F11.
As a result, all VMs running do not have access to sound, and report
back that they can not see a sound device. This happens regardless of
the OS running on the guest VM.

2) VMs do not shut down completely on some systems. The only way to get
then to shut down is to force kill VMware Workstation itself. This, of
course, causes other issues such as VM data file corruption. Killing
Workstation in this way also requires that you either restart all of the
VMware services or reboot your system. Once you have done that, the VMs
that were running are in a zombied state and you must manually go into
the VM's folder and delete the various lock files and folders VMware
uses to monitor a VM's state. This then allows you to restart the VM as
if it had be crashed via a forced power off.

I am able to reproduce problem number 1 on both my desktop and laptop
systems, and reproduce problem number 2 on my desktop. For some unknown
reason, my laptop doesn't seem to be impacted by problem number 2.

Note that, because it is not on their supported OS list, VMware will not
provide support to fix Workstation so that it will run on F11. Moreover,
since Workstation does run without issue on F10, VMware will first ask
the Fedora Project team what they have changed in F11 to cause
Workstation to have these issues.

There is some support on the VMware Communities lists, but as yet,
nobody that I have seen has come up with a fix for these particular
problems, and since they are Fedora specific, they will ask the Fedora
folks to at least provide some technical information to help
troubleshoot and resolve the problem. To date, that hasn't happened yet.
Instead, all the responses I have seen are things like "go ask VMware,"
or "Just run <insert alternate 'fan-boy' favorite desktop virtualization
tool here>."

As a VCP, I have access to extra resources inside of VMware, but I can't
give them anything meaningful without help from the Fedora Project team.

Would really appreciate getting some help here instead of finger
pointing and useless arguments about running something else because
people would rather pontificate than help.

Cheers,

Chris


--
=============================
"You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?'
I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

-- George Bernard Shaw






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