Rubénerd Blog :)

Sometimes a short train trip late at night through the Marias Pass train route in northern Montana with the 2001 era DirectX graphics and sky is just what I need to relax just before going to sleep.

I first got Train Simulator in 2002, it was the first game I tried on my desktop at the time, the first game I tried running with Boot Camp with my then-new MacBook Pro in early 2006 (Windows gaming on a MacBook Pro), and is still one of the reasons I keep a copy of Windows XP lying around for the 3D acceleration in software like VMware Fusion.

For someone who moved around so much as a kid and could never have huge trainsets, this was the closest I ever got, and I still find it fun :).

When I finally got around to installing the new VMware Fusion 3.0 update I downloaded yesterday I expected to get a slight performance improvement for my FreeBSD guests, but not as much as I would have got had I been running a Windows guest. The VMware Mac team have made it clear in their advertising they consider Fusion to be a product to run Windows on your Mac, and while other operating systems such as FreeBSD and Linux are supported, they’re not a priority. I’m really pleased and relieved to say I was wrong!

Read this post >

For all of you operating system enthusiasts, VMware Fusion 3.0 was just released for the Mac.

I bought a licence for Fusion 1.0 as soon as it came out in 2007 (Just bought VMWare Fusion) because at the time I was testing various different flavours of BSD and the later builds of Parallels Desktop weren’t playing nicely with them. By contrast, despite being heavily advertised as a way to run Windows, Fusion also had additions for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.

Given I got Fusion 2.0 as a free upgrade, being told I’d have to shell out AU$49.00 for 3.0 was a bit of a kick in the stomach, but if after using the trial for 30 days the performance is noticeably better I’ll upgrade.

I can never seem to remember this line, so I’ve decided to put it here. If you want access to the BIOS in VMware Fusion virtual machines so you can change the device boot order and so forth, add the following line to the machine’s .vmx file:

bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE"

When you reboot the VM will load the BIOS configuration screen without you having to frantically press a command key like F2 or DEL. When you reboot, the default behaviour returns.

The problem is, Fusion VMs are configured by default to boot from the hard drive first then the optical drive, meaning once you’ve installed an OS it ignores booting from the optical drive entirely. This will let you take care of this.

Grilled cheese sandwiches have cheese.

My Applications folder is one full beast!

Since I first picked up my first copies of Connectix Virtual PC for my Blueberry iMac DV I’ve been awestruck by the elegance of virtual machines and have had a ridiculous amount of fun tinkering with operating systems and software I probably would not have otherwise been able to use. Some like FreeBSD have even "graduated" and become primary operating systems on machines I use, others like DOS and earlier versions of Windows get to stick around for bouts of electronic nostalgia.

Given I’ve been so busy with other projects and studying I thought the long Easter weekend would be a great time to look into some lesser known virtual machine programs for Mac: Q and VirtualBox. I’ll be posting my full reviews in the next day or so, but suffice to say they both fill their intended rolls amazingly well and could give the commercial Mac virtualisation solutions a run for their money. They’re free and open source, so you can download them and give them a shot right now!

For the sake of completeness, I talked about Parallels Desktop a lot back in 2006 when I was first messing around with FreeBSD on my then-new Intel MacBook Pro, then switched to VMware Fusion in 2007 because of it’s superior support for Unix-like clients. It’s kind of fun to look back at those posts for me, at the time I thought such experimentation was fun but essentially pointless; I had no idea how much I was actually learning.

If you love tinkering with obscure and/or old operating systems, it’s a great time to be alive! Now all I need is time…

The pointless OS rambling episode!

Recording shows at 03:45am; bizarre South Australian and Indian timezones off by half an hour; installing operating systems in virtual machines, VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, Parallels Desktop, VirtualBox; getting your hands dirty with real partitioning; choosing from FreeBSD, Draco GNU/Linux, OS/2 Warp 4.x, BeOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, NetBSD; why it’s a great time for OS enthusiasts to be alive; and why this should really have been filed under Rubenerd Unplugged and not made into a proper show!

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 17:00 7.9MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

A few days ago I mentioned that the first Release Candidate for VMware Fusion 2.0 for the Mac was made available, and I listed some of the issues I had with running the previous beta releases, with the hope the RC would fix them.

The RC didn’t fix the most nagging issue I’ve been having, but I may be onto something.

As you know I primarily run FreeBSD in VMware Fusion: I know I’m a niche user but VMware does state FreeBSD is a supported OS, and it’s the reason I went ahead and purchased a licence for their product instead of Parallels Desktop. In the version 1.x series, both FreeBSD and NetBSD performed flawlessly and I was extremely pleased with the purchase!

In the Betas for version 2.0 however, both FreeBSD and NetBSD have been suffering from appaulingly slow X11 performance. Both Xorg and Xfree86 take many minutes to load on these systems as opposed to the almost instantaneous load times in the version 1.x series of Fusion.

ASIDE: Before you get too scared, X11 performance in OpenSolaris and GNU/Linux distributions seem to be just fine!

The first Release Candidate seemed to make no difference to performance, until I was sitting at a coffee shop with my WiFi connection turned off. For some reason, without a network connection, typing startx in both FreeBSD and NetBSD caused their respective X11 environments to start instantaneously once again. Back home and plugged into the wired network, both virtual machines returned to sluggish performance.

The next step was to determine if I could reproduce the conditions back at the coffee shop and get back regular performance. Clicking the Network Adaptor icon in the status bar in the VMs and disabling the network completely eliminated the painfully long startx waiting time.

I’m hoping the final release of Fusion 2.0 will solve this problem, otherwise I’m back to using 1.0. Not to mind, Unity and the other more advanced features are Windows only anyway. It’s a shame though that they’re marketing it as a solution for running Windows on your Mac, not a solution for running different OSs on your Mac.

For those who are also avid VMware Fusion users, you’ll be pleased to know the first Release Candidate for VMware Fusion 2.0 has been released (build number 113392).

For my own selfish needs, I only had three problems with the last beta which I’m hoping this RC has fixed:

Performace Issues with BSD hosts

Linux distributions performed just fine, but X.org in FreeBSD and Xfree86 in NetBSD on my MacBook Pro with 2GiB of RAM took far longer to load and performed worse than my 200MHz Pentium MMX box with 32 megs. This is not an exaggeration!

Folders that don’t disappear

In an attempt to backup my virtual drives as I like to do on a regular basis, I moved a folder from the virtual Windows 2000 machine to my Leopard desktop. Instead of copying over, the folder vanished from the guest, and didn’t appear on the host! One solid week of work down the toilet!

No stretched resolutions

VMware Fusion 1.x did not stretch the guest’s screen resolution when it was lower than the host’s. This meant in full screen there would generally be black bands on the sides, below and above the guest display… which was just fine for me! The Fusion 2.x betas flipped the default configuration so that it stretches the virtual screen which perhaps is useful for gamers but for reading text on an LCD it looks dreadful! As far as I can tell there’s no way to change this in the GUI, and adding lines to my preferences file turning off GuestToHost does nothing.

I might not have much time to look over these issues fully this evening or tomorrow, but I’ll certainly let you know what I find out when I can get back around to it. Stay tuned.

ASIDE: For what it’s worth, I’ve learned my lesson with virtual machine betas: they’re not worth it. Other "beta" products are actually quite usable, but not software like this. In the future I’ll be sticking with the latest stable release, in order to protect my sanity :-)

UPDATE: An abridged version of this review has been picked up by the fine folks over at BSD News. If you’ve arrived here from there, all my FreeBSD and NetBSD posts can be found in the aptly-named BSD category. Cheers :-)

I’ve loved using virtualisation software ever since I had an early version of Connectix Virtual PC for my iMac DV back in the early 2000s, and later their Windows version before they were bought out by Microsoft. Virtual PC was mostly intended for people to use recent versions of Windows on Mac OS 8, but I preferred using it for resurrecting classic operating systems such as DOS/Windows 3.x which we had on our first home machine, and playing around with Linux distributions without going through tedious partitioning.

My predictably unnecessarily verbose introduction aside, the latest virtualisation software I’m using on a regular basis is VMware Fusion for Mac OS X, and I’ve been very pleased with it. The second beta release for version 2.0 is out now, and I spent my Sunday afternoon trying out build 107508 with a handful of my most used operating systems, plus FreeDOS for fun!

VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 2 Virtual Machine Library

The most noticeable difference initially between this latest beta and version 1 of Fusion is the redesigned Virtual Machine Library. Taking a cue from Virtual PC, the plain text listing of virtual machines has been revised to include screenshots for the suspended machines. While I think this is a extremely useful and welcome addition for quickly recognising machines visually, I think the Mac-like glossy finishes are a bit overdone. Also despite making the interface more Mac-like overall, I can’t help but think the New, Open and Settings would better be served by a regular toolbar at the top of the window.

The New Virtual Machine Assistant has been improved to allow for more boot and drive options. You’re no longer limited to choosing from a physical or virtual optical disc; you can choose to use an existing virtual drive or even none at all: a VERY welcome addition! Before you run the machine the first time you’re asked whether you want to modify settings too, which means you no longer have to start the machine at the end of the assistant and hastily shut it down to fine tune its configuration.

VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 2 New Virtual Machine Assistant

Speaking of configuration, the Virtual Machine Settings window has been drastically redesigned to make it look much more like the Mac System Preferences application, and to make it easier to access all the new options and virtual devices you can configure. Amongst the new goodies are the ability to configure floppy drives, parallel ports, serial ports, and multiple virtual hard drives. When I saw these additions, I literally jumped out of my chair and screamed "HELL YEAH!"

Fusion 2.0 beta 2 also allows you to visually scale and stretch live running virtual machine displays. Even just a little bit of scaling adversely affects the readability of text, but perhaps for other applications such as full screen gaming which needs to be scaled to fit to an unsupported resolution this might be useful.

Demonstration of the live visual scaling in beta 2. Both the NetBSD and Slackware virtual machines are set to 1024×768 but the latter has been scaled down.

Now for the bad news. I’m not sure if this is a temporary setback as a result of it being a beta version (I did disable debugging checks), but graphical performance in BSD operating systems on my original generation MacBook Pro is nothing short of abysmal. VMware provides welcome additions for FreeBSD, but even installing these in FreeBSD 6.3 Release and using them with the compat6x layer in FreeBSD 7.0 Release made no difference to the overall sluggishness. NetBSD 4.0 was just as bad, without any additions.

This slow performance was most pronounced when I started Xorg on FreeBSD or XFree86 on NetBSD. Typically starting an X11 environment in VMware Fusion 1.x takes less than a second followed by several seconds for loading the desktop environment or vanilla window manager. With Fusion 2.0 beta 2, both FreeBSD and NetBSD take over 5 minutes just to start X11, and another few minutes just to load something as lightweight as Fluxbox… if you want to load Xfce or KDE it takes over a whopping 10 minutes.

To check whether this was a problem with BSD, I tried Slackware Linux 12.1 with the same versions of KDE, Xfce and Xorg; and while it still felt a little sluggish it still managed to load all three in a reasonable amount of time.

Given I need to use FreeBSD for my studies I just can’t use this beta release on a production machine, but if you primarily use Windows or Linux you could probably try it out.