Fedora & VMWare “right side up”
Not all that long ago I expressed optimism about hosting VMWare on Fedora (Virtual satisfaction with VMware Server and kernel 2.6.31). I should have seen the writing on the wall, but I didn’t.
I’m used to Fedora releases sticking with minor updates to the kernel they start with, i.e., I was expecting Fedora 12 to stick with kernel 2.6.31. Wrong! A few months ago Fedora 12 updated to kernel 2.6.32. Though I was able to get VMware to sort of run on kernel 2.6.32 with the conventional recipes, it wasn’t right. In particular, my Windows 2000 Pro virtual machine would start to boot and then die when running on VMWare Server 1.0.10 on Fedora 12 with kernel 2.6.32.
The advice thread (vmware-specific-specific 5.5.x and kernel 2.6.32) that originally made me optimistic did not continue to offer encouragement. Anticipating Fedora 13 and kernel 2.6.33 left me more pessimistic about the VMWare on Fedora course.
So I started thinking about alternatives. My experience with KVM and VirtualBox didn’t entice in either of those directions. So I flipped over one practice of the last three years [Upside Down (Windows over Fedora 7 Linux)] and switched to another [Real Virtual] — now the machine that had been running Windows 2000 hosted by Fedora 12 is now running Fedora 13 hosted by Windows XP. I don’t have a solution, yet, for the Digium Wildcard TDM400P. Except for that, which will only matter, if and when I get back to pursuing Asterisk, “right side up” (Fedora VM hosted on XP) seems just fine.