This section describes some of the things you can do with the Virtual Machine. Users who are familiar with virtualisation will find little new here — the techniques are mostly common to all guest systems — but there are a few special considerations for GNUstep.
In VMware Player, requires VMware Tools and the VMware Tools User Process must be enabled.
The guest system has a virtual screen, which is simply a window on the host system. Unlike a real screen, you can stretch and squeeze the virtual screen, by dragging its window handles.
You will then need to resize the GWorkspace desktop to the new virtual screen size:
In the GWorkspace menu (click the screen background, if need be, to make this appear) choose:
Logoutto close down the existing desktop. You will see a blue screen background.
Click on the screen background to obtain the WindowMaker menu. In this menu, choose:
Exit
to bring up a sub-menu and, in this sub-menu, choose:
Restart
to restore the GNUstep desktop. It will now fill the window and the icons will be rearranged to make best use of the space.
In VMware Player, requires VMware Tools but not the VMware Tools User Process.
In Virtual Box, auto-mounting of Shared Folders requires the official Guest Additions from Oracle Corporation.
You can nominate directories on the host system as shared folders, which the guest system can read from and write to. This is a convenient way of exchanging data between guest and host. Ordinary users, such as Developer, can access shared folders but most of the setting up of the guest system needs to be done under the root username (password linux).
You can either arrange for shared folders to be auto-mounted — that is, automatically mounted at system start-up — or you can mount them manually while the system is running.
First, you must enable the shared folders facility and nominate the host system folders that you want to share — for example, you might want the folder /home/Raeburn/Images to be available as a shared folder called Shared_images. At the same time, if you are using VirtualBox, you can specify whether the folders are to be auto-mounted. Use VMware Player's or VirtualBox's settings dialogue.
You need to download and install the official Virtual Box Guest Additions, because auto-mounting does not work with the version of the Guest Additions that is built into the Virtual Machine. Proceed as described in Upgrading Virtual Box Guest Additions.
You must also ensure the users who require access to the shared folders are members of group vboxsf. To set up user Developer, for example, enter the following command as root:
groups Developer
Then:
If this returns just a single group e.g. users, enter:
usermod -G vboxsf Developer
If the groups command returned more than one group — for example:
users audio cdrom
then ignore the first of them and enter the remainder followed by vboxsf — in this example:
usermod -G audio,cdrom,vboxsf Developer
Note how the group names are separated by commas, not spaces, and we have chopped off the first group users and appended the group vboxsf to the list.
Login as one of the users you have set up with access to the shared folders, e.g. Developer (you may need to reboot first), and look in the /media directory. You should see something like:
cdrom sf_Shared_images
sf_Shared_images is your shared folder — in fact, just another name for the host system's /home/Raeburn/Images directory.
When you have started up your Virtual Machine, you will see that there is a directory
/mnt/hgfs/Shared_images
which is your shared folder — in fact, just another name for the host system's /home/Raeburn/Images directory.
In both VirtualBox and VMware Player, you can create your own mount point and mount the shared folder on it:
On the guest system, create a mount point — that is, an empty directory in the place where you want the contents of the shared folder to appear:
mkdir /mnt/gallery
The root user (password linux) can mount the shared folder. On VirtualBox, the command is:
mount -t vboxsf Shared_images /mnt/gallery
In VMware, it is:
mount -t vmhgfs .host:/Shared_images /mnt/gallery
(type the characters '.host:/' exactly as written above).
To simplify the mounting of shared folders, you need to add an entry like the following to the file /etc/fstab for VirtualBox:
Shared_images /mnt/gallery vboxsf defaults 0 0
or for VMware it would be:
.host:/Shared_images /mnt/gallery vmhgfs defaults 0 0
You can now mount the shared folder by using the command:
mount /mnt/gallery
Under VMware only (not under VirtualBox), you can enable the user Developer to mount the shared folder. To do this, you must add the option users to the fstab entry, so it will now read:
.host:/Shared_images /mnt/gallery vmhgfs defaults,users 0 0
You also need to make user Developer the owner of the mount point:
chown -c Developer:users /mnt/gallery
and set the vmhgfs mount helper to be suid root:
chmod -c +s /sbin/mount.vmhgfs
Alternatively, on both VirtualBox and VMware, you can make the system mount the folder automatically at initialisation time. To do this, the fstab entry for VirtualBox will be something like:
Shared_images /mnt/gallery vboxsf defaults,auto 0 0
or, for VMware,
.host:/Shared_images /mnt/gallery vmhgfs defaults,auto 0 0
Marking an fstab entry as 'auto' can cause problems, due to an incompatibility between the initialisation scripts and the mount helpers for VMware and Virtual Box. Therefore, the auto-mount procedure described earlier is preferred.
In VMware Player, requires VMware Tools and the VMware Tools User Process must be enabled.
You can cut, copy and paste text, in either direction, between programs running on the host system and programs running on the guest. This is a very handy way of transferring small quantities of data.
In addition, under VMware only, you can use the X Window System's select/insert method.
To use these features:
Use programs, on both sides, that support the cut/copy/paste protocol or (for VMware Player only) the X Window System's select/insert protocol. GNUstep applications support cut, copy and paste where applicable.
Note that some programs do not support all of the cut, copy and paste commands all of the time — for example, in the GNUstep Terminal application, you cannot cut existing text from the display, you can only copy it.
Use the correct keyboard shortcuts for each program. Non-GNUstep programs normally use Ctrl-X for cut, Ctrl-C for copy and Ctrl-V for paste, whereas GNUstep software is usually set up to use the Alt key as modifier instead of Ctrl.
Remember that cut, copy and paste will only work if the system (guest or host) on which you are trying to do it owns the keyboard and mouse. Because you are cutting or copying from one system and pasting into the other, you will have to transfer ownership of keyboard and mouse between the operations — normally this just requires a mouse click.
The Virtual Machine can access the Internet, and any machines on your local network, via a virtual Ethernet adapter:
To ensure that the Virtual Ethernet Adapter is enabled in your virtualisation software, select the GNUstep virtual machine (but do not start it for now) and:
Start the Virtual Machine, log in as root (password linux) and add or amend the file
/etc/resolv.confThis should contain, at least, the line
nameserver a.b.c.dwhere a.b.c.d is the IP address either of you local nameserver, if you have one, or of your ISP's nameserver.
Sound does work. You may not be likely to listen to music through a player in your Virtual Machine — running a player on the host machine would give better results. But programs on your guest machine can make sounds such as beeps, fanfares and warning signals, which you may want to hear.
Remember that the sound passes through two sound systems — the guest system's virtual sound card and the host system's real sound card. There are therefore two mixers. If the sound is muted in either of them, you will hear nothing. If the volume is turned down in both of them to, say, 50%, you will not hear 50% sound volume — you will hear 25%.
It is best to control the sound levels through the host machine's mixer and to leave the guest system's controls set at maximum. In the guest system:
Bring up a Terminal window.
Launch the alsamixer program.
Ensure that both the Master and PCM volume controls are unmuted (use the m key to toggle between muted and unmuted).
Adjust the volume by using the up and down cursor movement keys. You can also adjust the left and right channels independently — see the alsamixer manual for details.
Use the left and right cursor movement keys to move between controls.
Use the Esc key to exit.
The VMware Tools include a number of programs for monitoring and controlling the system:
vmware-toolbox has a graphical user interface that allows you to control various settings. Many of these are the same as the ones you can control through the VMware program's Virtual Machine Settings dialogue.
vmware-toolbox-cmd does the same job, from the command line.
vmware-hgfsclient reports the shared folder name.
vmstat prints statistics, somewhat similar to top.
vm-support collects various configuration and log files for use when troubleshooting the Linux guests. It should be run under the root username to collect the maximum information.
The system is designed to be usable 'out of the box'. But you can change it to suit your own tastes — for example, you can change passwords, add users, or change the appearance of the screen — it is just a normal Linux-based system and you can re-configure it any way you like.
To configure or administer the system, you will usually need to login as root — the password is
linux
You can administer the system using the standard Linux commands. Alternatively, you can use the openSUSE YaST2 utility; open this in a terminal window by typing:
YaST2
The version of YaST2 installed in this Virtual Machine displays a character based screen rather than a full GUI and is driven by keyboard commands. It actually has most of the features of the full GUI version, but they can be a little hard to find and to use. If you wish, you can install the full GUI version (by using YaST2, of course) — but note that this will pull in a lot of extra packages due to dependencies.
For information on using YaST2, please see the openSUSE 11.4 Reference Guide.
You can install extra software onto your Virtual Machine. The guest system is openSUSE 11.4 and any packages you install must be compatible with it.
The standard way of installing software on an openSUSE system is YaST2.
As an alternative to using YaST2, you can download the packages you require and install them manually by using the rpm program. It may be easiest to locate and download the packages by using your host computer's web browser, then place them in a Shared Folder so that you can access them from your guest system.
YaST2 in this virtual machine has been configured with the GNUstep repository and also the openSUSE 11.4 'oss' (Open-Source Software), 'non-oss' (non-Open Source Software) and 'source' (source code packages) repositories.
In YaST2, go to Software —> Software Management. The page will come up with the Search Phrase text box selected; this is a useful way of locating packages that are in the configured repositories. Locate each of the packages you want to install, mark it as to be installed (you will then see an 'i' against it) and click on OK.
Another way of selecting packages is to use the Patterns or the Repositories view. You can see these views by using the Filter drop-down menu box which is just above the Search Phrase box.
In the Patterns view, you see a list of available patterns down the left hand side of the screen. If you mark one of these for installation, all the packages in it will be installed. There are three GNUstep patterns — for the base system, the applications and the documentation. The Virtual Machine is shipped with the base system and some of the applications pre-installed, but not the documentation.
In the Repositories view, you see the whole contents of any chosen repository. Mark the packages you want to be installed.
Apart from the repositories already available, you can add more by running YaST2. First, you need to find out the URL of the repository you want to add. Then:
In YaST2, go to Software —> Software Repositories. YaST will initialise itself and display the Configured Software Repositories screen.
Use the Tab key to go to the Add command and hit the Enter key. YaST2 will display the Media Type screen.
Choose FTP, HTTP or HTTPS according to the repository protocol — you can get this from the first few characters of the URL. Then click the Next command. YaST2 will display the Server and Directory screen.
In the Repository Name field, you can enter any name you like. In the URL of the Repository field, enter the URL of your repository, without the protocol component e.g. http://; this will already have been entered by YaST2. Click the Next command. YaST2 will add the new repository to the list of configured repositories.
The Packman repository is particularly useful for multimedia software. To add the Packman repository in YaST2, choose a mirror from the list at:
ftp://packman.links2linux.de/pub/packman/MIRRORS
Append suse/11.4 to the mirror you have chosen from the list. Use this as the repository URL in the above procedure.
If you want to install packages manually from Packman, use the search facility at:
<http://packman.links2linux.org/search>
and select the check boxes for openSUSE 11.4 and for the correct machine architecture.