On Sun, 21 Oct 2012 00:41:47 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>>>> 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?"

That should have been your leading question, then. ;)

>> 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).

And in the docs they have a list of supported releases.

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

Version?

> 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.

Yes, some/many distributions use an open source version of VMware's 
tools, and in those cases, the VMware supplied package actively conflicts 
with the OST package (as I recall it's named).

>> 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?

As I recall, from the last time I installed the tools (which has been a 
while as I'm using VirtualBox now), it was part of the tools build script 
- provides an option to "build anyways".

>> 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?

Asked and answered.  I had it working when I used VMware.
 
>> 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...)

So, shared folders didn't work.  That's but one feature the tools 
provide.  As noted, they add accelerated (or more properly /optimised/) 
hardware drivers, and also some host/guest API integration.

> 
>>> 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...

LPIC-1 is a starting point, but it doesn't cover a lot of depth.  I've 
held that one since 2003 myself.

But remember that technical certifications are a measurement of the /
minimally qualified candidate/ (and remember that I used to work in 
certification program development, so I do know what I'm talking about 
with it).

Jim

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