Thanks to Eric's recommendation, I have installed VMWare Player on my notebook. A couple of hours after installing this, I had a full version of SUSE Linux with KDE 3.5 up and running. It's fast and it's free, and it gets me away from all the nasty little gribbles that have been plaguing me when it comes to doing development work on Windows.

Except for networking.

It's on my notebook, as I mentioned. At work, I plug the notebook into a spare port in the ethernet switch on my desk. At home, I have WiFi. In between, I have wireless internet. So I have three network connections which I use at different times.

I need two things: One, that the virtual machine can connect to Windows on the notebook itself, and two, when I do have a network connection, that the virtual machine can access it.

Here's the problem. When a network connection is disconnected on Windows, Windows can't ping itself on that network port.

This is stupid. It means that Linux running under VMWare can only talk to Windows running on the same machine when I have the network cable plugged in.

VMWare supports a "host only" mode, where the guest operating system can only connect to the host machine (in my case, Linux talking to Windows), but as far as I can see, this suffers from the exact same problem.

It also supports virtual networks, which would satisfy part one, but you can only use them under VMWare Player if the person who set up the guest operating system configured them at the time. And for the copy of SUSE I'm using, they didn't.

So it almost, almost does everything I want, except it doesn't.

Oh, and every time I switch from WiFi to ethernet, I have to spend half an hour fighting with it before it will talk to itself.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:07 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 346 words, total size 2 kb.