Yesterday, Version 2.0 of the Virtual Machine Additions for Linux were released on the Microsoft Download Center. Officially, this provides addition support for Virtual Server 2005 SP1, however I have read reports from the beta program suggesting they may also work under Virtual PC (albeit unsupported). The additions are for RedHat and SuSE based Linux distributions. I tried converting the supplied RPM files into .DEB files for installation in Ubuntu, but the scripts would then get installed specifically test for being installed on a Debian distribution and fail early. If I was feeling adventurous I'd remove these checks and see what happened - but my Linux knowledge is a little sketchy so I'll stick with VMWare for now for heavy duty Ubuntu use until I read about someone clever getting them up and running.
You dont need the Linux Addons
To get the mouse working add the boot option:
i8042.noloop
And to get X working just change the colordepth in /etc/X11/xorg.conf from 24 to 16
James,
Thanks very much - see the following post for more details on that.
http://www.woodwardweb.com/programming/000387.html
The reason I would want the drivers is so that if you move the mouse to the edge of the screen etc that it automatically goes back into the host machine.
Thanks for mentioning the noloop thing though - great tip.
Martin.
I absolutely, positively, definitely appreciated this post. Martin, thanks for putting the notes up in a public space like this.
I sincerely hope that somebody will also take the trouble to get the additions working - particularly under Ubuntu.
The value of the VPC additions for me also lies in the ability to move seamlessly and effortlessly between host and guest environmenets as well as the ability to drag & drop files between the environments.
Furthermore, when the additions have been installed you can access folders on the host machine as a shared folder under the VPC settings.
The other "tricks" that get the environment to function do not overcome these issues.
Comment:
========
Whereas VPC is still free (like in beer) VMWare full edition is not. For us Windoze users it is still the cheapest option at this point in time - something the Linux users should not thumb their noses at too readily.