Time sync of a linux virtual machine on an ESX host

It took me a while to find this following information, maybe it is of use to someone out there.
If you have installed the VMware-tools on your linux box but don't have X you can't use 'vmware-toolbox'. However you can turn on synchronisation with:

> vmware-guestd --cmd "vmx.set_option synctime 0 1"

You can (and should) turn off ntpd if you do this.

Damn Small Linux

Good, small image (50MB). So I fired up the laptop again. Had troubles booting, at first I suspected the pcmcia (so booted with 'dsl nopcmcia') which got me further but would hang eventually. So I tried to boot with 'lowram' which did the trick. As by now I suspected the laptop is 'old' I choose the 'Xfbdev' option for the 'X setup'. After this there are the usual questions about mouse and keyboard and then I get the message 'modprobe: Can't locate module fb0' (and the startup aborts there). It looks like the setup wants to start X but can't. Anyway, by now I changed to manual install: startup with 'failsafe' and then follow the script on the DSL wiki. This works like a charm and after this my X display WILL start.
Resolution is good, pcmcia card is detected, Firefox works: it looks like I'm in business :-)

Tried another Linux distro

As the old Toshiba Tecra8000 laptop was/is doing nothing anyway I thought why not.
I downloaded the 'Debian 3.1 R5 network install' cd and fired it up (it's the easiest way as the iso is something like 100MB and therefore fits on a rewritable, everything else will be downloaded at request; the website has something like 14 iso's for this release and I have no intention to find out which ones I would need). I chose the 'put everything in one partition' option because the laptop has a small 6.5 GB disk and there will be a lot of stuff to download (to be honest, this installation is the second try so I knew what was coming: during install of the downloaded stuff the 1.9GB partition was full).
Installation of the base system went smoothly enough and after the first reboot even my PCMCIA network card was recognised without missing a beat. The system started to download some necessities and then asks for the kind of software: 'desktop' looks about right and downloading continues for a few hundred MB's (still a lot better then any couple of iso's).
After doing some shopping I came back to find the system waiting for my okay for using the 'vesa' driver for it's X server (it sounded familiar so what the heck). Mouse detection is no problem and then the system asks all kinds of stuff about the display. Fortunately, I had found that out before. After that there is more unpacking going on (the harddrive is purring for about an hour). Finally it's ready, the screen becomes a blur and it's the 'fingers crossed' moment while I wait for the login prompt of the graphical interface. It works and I get the familiar looking desktop. So far so good, but exploring the system will have to wait until I have nothing better to do.

Update xubuntu from 6.06 to 6.10

This seems to be quite an adventure. It's lovely to play with on a laptop that's only used to play around with, I'm glad I don't really need it for work.
The Edgy Eft distribution (6.10) needs special treatment for the update that I found here.
I did that and apart from some annoying things (like a question that is asked after I thought finally I could go downstairs to whatch some tv) it probably went smoothly enough, although it took all evening to complete. That is, I think it was completed as I had only a desktop to look at with no activity so I switched it off for the night.
I quickly found out that the wireless stuff needs some more tweaking as something with the ndiswrapper package is changed or something like that. When starting up the Synaptic Package Manager I got an error message, luckily with the needed commandline (dpkg --configure -a). It looks like a lot of stuff needs to be configured first, or maybe it was not done yesterday because I shut down the laptop.
Okay, the package manager works after the configuration. After some searching I found this document that indicates I have to re-do some work, which turned out to be correct. What I did was:
- selected ndiswrapper-utils-1.8 in the package manager and install that
- sudo rm /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper (a shell script)
- sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper-1.8 /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper
- sudo modprobe ndiswrapper (wheee! success!!)
The wireless card is recognized and the NetworkManager Applet even asks for a keyring password to be saved. Of course I am scepical so I rebooted and waited for the loadndiswrapper error during boot... it did not appear! I also don't have to re-insert the card, however I do have to enter the network name and password (in fact I have to enter the password twice now, once for the applet and once for the keyring thinghy).

Working on the Wireless

Now it would be nice to get the wireless card to work (the wired network card works without tweaking). I have a Linksys WPC54G v3 card which means I'm in for a lot of fun. I first wanted to try to get it working without using ndiswrapper, but I also use WPA encryption on my wireless network. So first, according to the ubuntu WifiDocs I start with:
sudo apt-get install network-manager
sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome
But it's not much use as the system doesn't detect my wireless card.

In the meantime, I found this message on the forum which is fairly recent and seems to do the trick. Will have to use ndiswrapper but what the heck, if it will work.

Yep, wireless is up. Basically, the instructions in that last thread make it work. It makes you use the windows drivers in ndiswrapper and use wpa_supplicant to take care of the WPA.

This looks so much better

Okay, back to the Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop. I found that although Xubuntu claims to be the Linux distribution for older hardware, the standard installer requires too much power. After reading on forums I found I probably needed to use the 'alternate' boot cd. And yes, that does the trick: the first menu option after startup is 'text mode installer' and that works like it should. Hey, if I want to install a system I have no need to wait 15 minutes until a desktop is loaded (in memory) that I won't be using for the install anyway (I do get the impression that installation takes a bit long in text mode, though). It's great to have an alternative but I'm a bit disappointed that the normal installer just 'hangs' instead of telling me I don't have enough memory.

I had to change the display setting to this:
sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf :
- Monitor section, change HorizSync to 36-52 and VertRefresh to 36-60.
- Screen section, added "1024x768" to all display subsections
I found the Linux on Toshiba Laptop site to be very useful for this.

Finally

Was bored today and therefore butchered the Ubuntu 6.06 installaton on my old laptop (Toshiba Tecra 8000). It was dreadfully slow so I uninstalled so much stuff that it finally just stopped working (nothing happening after reboot).

So then I discovered Xubuntu which looked like it might be what I needed. Downloaded the image, burned it and fired up the thing. I thought I had it installing (which is quite a feat since Linux thinks my display can only do 480x300 or something like that, I had to guess that the right selections were selected because there is no scrolling on the installation screens) but came back after shopping to find it was still... only 0%.

Turns out it's a known problem (like http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1534301), which is boring because Xubuntu is meant to be made for old computers. Oh well, more tomorrow.