Colin Charles Agenda

So, I promised a bunch of people I’d write up how I used the P1 W1MAX WIGGY on my Mac. The gist behind this is VMWare hosts a guest OS that is Windows, and the host OS can be either Mac OS X or Linux, and all should be well, in terms of sharing the Internet connection, out to the host OS (via bridged networking). This will work if you have Linux as your host OS as well – you just need a Windows guest (since the bloody Wiggy drivers only work using Windows).

First up, I downloaded a modern VMware Fusion. Without realising this, I actually had a license for the 1.x product lying around, and I just upgraded it, for free. Win. You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just use VirtualBox? Its because for some reason, I can’t seem to get Windows Vista running in it — I’ll work on it later, but I just use what works and gets the job done.

So once Windows is installed (a very streamlined process, I didn’t even have to do anything, and it was ready in about 20 minutes), I proceeded to getting my Wiggy working on my Mac.

Create a wireless network on the Mac

Click the airport logo, click “create network” and just have a random network created, with the default channel. You now have a “computer-to-computer” network, on your Mac.

Change VMWare settings to allow for bridged network

Click on the settings of your particular virtual machine, hop over the the network, and select “Connect directly to the physical network (Bridged)”.

Plug the Wiggy in

Now, the Wiggy should be detected in Windows, and it will install the driver. Once that is sorted, it will attempt to make a connection and it should just work, provided you have WIMAX in your area.

Go to Control Panel -> Network Connections, and select the second connection (in my case, Local Area Connection 2). Hop on over to the properties, and make sure you turn on Internet Connection Sharing.

You may have to disable Local Area Connection (1) and re-enable it for all this magic to take effect. But at this point in time, you should be able to, on your Mac, browse the web, with no problems, whatsoever.

You just have to keep Windows running…

Anything else?

I tend to keep a really tiny VM running for Windows. Yes, the standard 1GB might make sense, but that’s too much, if all you have is about 2GB of RAM… Windows Vista seems to plod along just fine with 512MB of RAM. I’m told that with Windows XP, you should be ahead, with 256MB of RAM even…

Some more semi-useful screenshots:

Some wimax info, at my residence – that’s the Windows VM, and a Mac backround

Also, if you care how fast the Internet is at my residence, is a paltry 6.9mbps. Upload speeds aren’t that hot, but the download speed definitely is – so I’m wondering if I should be getting WIMAX in my house now…

VirtualBox 1.6 is out. Note that now you can use Mac OS X and Solaris as a host platform. Naturally, having Mac OS X support excites me.

I tried installing a Ubuntu 8.04 server guest. Found a tiny issue – 64-bit guests aren’t supported yet :( So I pulled in the 32-bit ISO, and that installed just fine. Note that PAE support for guests exist now, and this is a good step in the right direction.

Sun’s building an OpenxVM community, which currently focus on xVM and xVM VirtualBox. It also harnesses technologies like Open Service Tag. All in all, I think a lot of MySQL users should be interested in virtualization, as there is a growing amount of hardware out there with many, many cores available for use.

Installing Ubuntu 8.04 server and getting past the kernel not booting
This is more of an Ubuntu problem, than a VirtualBox problem, but I faced an issue:

The kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU
0:6
Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU

Turns out, the problem was the wrong kernel was installed. Rescue Ubuntu, and install linux-generic. For reference, look at Unable to boot 8.04 Alpha 3 Server install on laptop and also the fix.

I managed to get my old Vista image created on Ubuntu Gutsy, to see if it would run under KVM on Fedora 8. Turns out I get a similar blue screen of death. Looks like it might be the splash screen of Windows causing KVM/QEMU to bork. Decided that it might be time to try VirtualBox.

No Fedora 8 RPMS are provided, so the Fedora 7 RPM will have to suffice. First snag? Lacking kernel-devel (by default, you now get kernel and kernel-headers). After installing that, its a simple sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup. Ensure that the user you’re running as, is also a member of the group vboxusers (you have to do this manually).

Starting up innotek VirtualBox is now a breeze. Though I have a feeling I have to run the setup everytime I get a new kernel (which is a problem in Fedora land, as there’s a rapid pace of development). This feeling was confirmed quite quickly, as I had a new kernel release almost immediately from the time I trialled this to the time I wrote this. At first glance, its an ugly application (Qt based).

Setting up a VM requires no KVM support, so in Fedora, this means removing kvm_intel and kvm from the running kernel. Good thing they’re modules, eh?

Setting up Window Vista was a breeze. Allocating it 1GB of RAM on my 2GB machine, seemed OK, as long as Firefox with multiple tabs weren’t running. Vista does something quirky – it pre-allocates all the RAM, probably by writing zeroes, and thus makes use of 1GB of RAM even before it starts. Oh well. At least I have Windows, and it performs, relatively well, so I can test software.

Networking? Much has been written about this, in fact, there’s even a ticket #504 for this. In fact, it was easy – Devices -> Install Guest Additions. Then get Windows to probe for new hardware, and add the network card. Very simple, quite unlike my KVM experience. If you for some reason want to mount the image itself, its located at /usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso.

Technorati Tags: virtualbox, windows, linux, fedora, fedora 8, vista

There didn’t seem like a clear way to make a copy (or clone) of a virtual machine with VMWare Server. Not with the 1.0.3 build-44356 which comes standard with the Ubuntu Commercial repository (one of the good virtues of Ubuntu).

So, I fired up the console, and did:
cp -ax Centos\ 5/ Centos\ 5-new

It took 4m5.643s to copy this on my laptop hard disk (only 1.5GB). I loaded it into VMWare, via their Open a virtual machine option, renamed it in the inventory, powered my new virtual machine on and was asked if I’d like to create a new UUID for it. I’d advise you to create one, and once that was done, my virtual machine is ready to go.

Create a new UUID, and you’re set

Exactly what I like. Not re-installing CentOS everytime. Just create a “golden” image and start cloning from there. Maybe with some slack/puppet integration in the future, if I end up using a lot of VMs.

Technorati Tags: linux, virtualization, vmware, vmware server, cloning an image, image, clone, testing, testbed, test environment