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Expanding A Vmware Disk

Posted on Jun 16 2009

After trying to compile a new kernel in VMware I ran out of disk space and needed to resize the .vmdk disk. It is a fairly simple process and the following command does all the work for you if you:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 12GB disk.vmdk
Obviously the new size of the disk can be set after the -x argument and the format for this can be found in vmware-diskmanager –help.

After this has been resized you will need to resize the partitions inside the VM. If you have a Linux Live CD to hand you can stick that in and boot up your VM. You need to be pretty quick and click inside the VM to be able to input commands ASAP. When you have done this hit escape in order to set the boot up sequence and tell it to boot from the CDROM.

When your live cd has fully booted load up gparted (or your own preferred choice of partition editors) and grow your main partition into the new free (unallocated) space. In my case I also had to delete the swap partition and move it but this will depend on each individual case.

After that is all done you should be able to reboot your VM with the new larger disk.

Ctrl-Alt-F1 In Vmware

Posted on May 22 2009

As anyone that uses Linux on a regular basis will know it is quite handy being able to change to a different console using the Ctrl, Alt and Function keys. In VMWare however this is a problem as the Ctrl-Alt combination releases control of the input devices to the host operating system.

Looking through the menus and there is no option immediately visible to allow this keystroke combination to be input. There is just the standard menu item to send Ctrl-Alt_Del. After a quick google it appears there is a relatively simple solution however.

By using the combination Ctrl-Alt-Spacebar, then releasing the space bar whilst keeping the other two buttons depressed you can then use Ctrl-Alt as normal. So in this case the key combination is Ctrl-Alt-Spacebar, release the space bar and hit the F1 key and voila.

More VMware trouble – Arrow Keys

Posted on May 07 2009

I installed vmware on another machine today to play around with a few things. Roughly the same setup as with my last set of keyboard woes but different problems this time.\r\n\r\nThe arrow keys didn\\\’t work as they should do at all. The keyboard mappings were obviously messed up as when I hit the up arrow in a terminal in the VM it decided that I wanted to take a screen shot. After checking the keyboard shortcuts defined in Gnome this showed that it had been somehow mapped to be the delete key.

A bit of googling and I found the following solution to the arrow key dilemma :

echo xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = t > ~/.vmware/config
This made the arrow keys function as expected (after a reboot of vmware). Back on to some real work now!

Shift/Ctrl/Alt Keys Not Working In Linux When Running Vmware

Posted on Mar 24 2009

Sometimes when I run Vmware under linux I have noticed that it manages to stop my Ctrl/Alt/Shift keys from working on the OS running Vmware. This has proven to be a real pain at times but the following solution works a treat for getting them working again. All that is needed is to run the following app in a terminal and it restores the functionality of all keys :

setxkbmap