>>> No, it would be accurate for you to say that you've never gotten it to
>>> work.
>>
>> OK, fair enough. But I doubt I'm the only person having this trouble.
>
> That doesn't translate to "nobody can get it to work".

I think the operative question is "how much of an expert do you need to 
be to make this work?"

> They build against some specific releases and have a generic installer
> for the rest.
>
> It seems  you found one that's not common and not compatible.  It
> happens.

When you create a new VM, it asks for the type of guest OS. It has 
options listed for RedHat (which I haven't used for decades), Ubuntu, 
and SUSE (but not OpenSUSE).

Amusingly, I tried Ubuntu and it didn't work. I also tried OpenSUSE and 
it didn't work.

To be fair though, /some/ of these distros somehow "detect" that they're 
running in a VM and install optimised video drivers. Windows doesn't do 
that.

> I've also seen the incorrect GCC version error (how do they
> determine that?  Perhaps, just maybe, there's a "compiled with gcc
> version x" bit in the header

Interesting. I'm not aware of any standard for doing that...

> There's an override option for that.

Now how the heck do you know that? Where is this written down?

> That also doesn't translate to "nobody can get it to work".

Well, no. Strictly speaking, the engineer employed by VMware presumably 
got it to work on his test bench. The question is, can anybody /else/ 
get it to work?

>> IIRC, I did get this stuff to actually compile and install once. But
>> after completing the install and rebooting the guest as requested, the
>> software /still/ didn't actually work. (Presumably there's some way
>> somewhere of determining whether it's even running, but I don't know
>> what that is.)
>
> Hmmm.  So, you say it doesn't work, but you don't know if it was
> running.  So how do you know it didn't work?

Because I couldn't actually transfer files between the guest OS and the 
host OS? That's more or less the only reason to bother installing VMware 
Tools. (Other than the accelerated hardware drivers...)

>> In other news, my new employer is apparently paying for me to get Linux
>> Professional Institute Certified...
>
> That's handy/convenient.  :)

Well, maybe. Apparently everybody else in the room is LPIC too, and none 
of them seem to know anything about Linux either...

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