Solaris on VMware: another one lost

So after the problem with VirtualBox, even VMware makes it difficult for me to run Solaris Express.

To summarise the problem with VirtualBox, well, the network doesn’t work, it’s a known problem probably due to the PCnet card not completely emulated.

With VMware the problem is more subtle: the graphic emulation is slower, the mouse movement clumsier, at least without the VMware tools installed in the guest operating system, so I installed them.

Since I installed them and configured xorg.conf, the size of the window increased to be bigger than the size of my monitors. Even if the xorg.conf is set to only allow 1152×900, the size taken by the X server is way higher, although I’m not sure what it really is.

Why running Solaris in a virtual machine is so difficult? I won’t use QEmu anytime soon, I had my past bad experience with kqemu (lockup of the box) and even if it’s GPL’d now, I don’t really trust it too much; I could use the modified QEmu with KVM, if I had a KVM-capable CPU, but the only one I have is the one from the MacBookPro, but I don’t really want to burn it out by having to do heavy work with the temperature I have here; beside it’s not as easy to handle as a two-screens workstation.

So right now my efforts to port xine-lib-1.2 to work fine on Solaris, and the work to be done to finish the audio conversion branch, are stalled and I have no clue when they’ll be resurrected; I’d need a new spare box (which is not going to be easy for me to take anyway, for space constrains), or a new main box (to run KVM); neither are likely to happen in the near future.

And now the big question: why should you care if you don’t use Solaris? If I can’t port the audio out plugin to the new branch, I can’t merge the branch into 1.2, and 1.2 series will not likely be released until at least that part of the code is merged back into it. There are already enough things that needs to be fixed or postponed, but I don’t really want to ignore the audio conversion improvement for 1.2 series.