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I’m in ur virtual machines, managing them

I’ve been working on an application recently which lets you create, configure, and run VMware virtual machines (it just forks out to VMware Player for the running part). It’s nearing usefulness now, so I thought I’d post some screenshots and stuff.


The main window


The configuration window

You need either qemu or vmware-vdiskmanager installed in order to create new hard disks, and it probably fails pretty badly currently if you don’t. If I get a chance, I may write my own stuff to create the hard disks (the format is a public spec, woo!). Anyway, you can get it from the vmx-manager module in gnome CVS.

Posted in General.

By snorp
12/8/2006

7 Responses

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  1. Eugenia said
    on 12/8/2006

    Would be nice if you also export to Parallels and QUEMU too, next to VMWare player. Personally, I prefer VMWare Player on Windows, but on my non-standard Linux distro VMWare Player is a major pain to setup, so QEMU is preferred, while Parallels is starting to become important too.

  2. Pierre said
    on 12/9/2006

    > Parallels is starting to become important too.

    Parallels is becoming important? They are only “important” on the Mac, as in “there is nothing else there yet”. VMware will deliver its public beta for the Mac before then end of 2006. At which point Parallels is going to become pretty much irrelevant, like they are on Linux and Windows.

    Personally, instead of wasting his time with Parallels, I hope James is going to spend his time in a much more productive way, for example by:
    o supporting a wider range of VMware virtual devices,
    o extending his application to not only handle VMware files, but also manipulate VMs while they run using the VMware APIs.

  3. brendan said
    on 12/11/2006

    Hey snorp, I was just trying to compile your vmx-manager that I checked out from gnome… I get an error when I run make. Not sure what to do with it, any help?

    /bin/bash: debug: command not found
    make[1]: [Hal.dll] Error 127 (ignored)
    make[1]: *** No rule to make target `Hal.dll.mdb’, needed by `all-am’. Stop.
    make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/bmartens/applications/vmx-manager/hal-sharp’
    make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

  4. brendan said
    on 12/11/2006

    Hey snorp, I was just trying to compile your vmx-manager that I checked out from gnome… I get an error when I run make. Not sure what to do with it, any help?

    /bin/bash: debug: command not found
    make[1]: [Hal.dll] Error 127 (ignored)
    make[1]: *** No rule to make target `Hal.dll.mdb’, needed by `all-am’. Stop.
    make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/bmartens/applications/vmx-manager/hal-sharp’
    make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

  5. brendan said
    on 12/11/2006

    Sorry about the dual posts… I was just trying to get it to display the code properly. : ( ah well. If anyone has any ideas, I’d appreciate them.

  6. snorp said
    on 12/11/2006

    brendan: do you have gmcs installed?

Continuing the Discussion

  1. snorp.net » more vmx-manager stuff linked to this post on 12/18/2006

    [...] I’m still working hard on vmx-manager, and I think it’s coming along pretty well. I spent a good chunk of last week writing my own code for creating VMware Virtual Disks. The VMDK specification is pretty straightforward, but implementing it proved to be more tedious than I expected (”the devil is in the details”). The end result seems to work pretty well, so now vmx-manager can create disks without relying on qemu or vmware-vdiskmanager. Soon I might try to add a couple more features in this area, such as the ability to grow an existing disk (which in theory should be easy — just add extents). I’ve made a screencast of the app as I put it through its paces, and you can find up-to-date screenshots here. [...]

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