On 2024-03-01 22:04, Alexander Boettcher wrote: <snip>
VMWare products are not used by any of the core developers, so the support will be limited.
No worries at all. They're popular in some circles, maybe due to vm snapshot support, and decent DirectX support for Windows VMs.
Broadcom recently bought VMware Inc, so the desktop products now have an unknown future. :(
That being said, I can try with KVM based VMs as well. Might give that a go later to see what happens.
<snip>
For a short test I tried the VMWare player on Ubuntu 22.04. I couldn't find a way to import the raw disk image directly
File -> Open -> "Select the .vmdk file" didn't work?
so I converted it
qemu-img convert -O vmdk sculpt-23-10.img sculpt-23-10.vmdk
Thanks. Totally forgot that qemu-img existed. I'll muck around with that a bit, and see if I can create an ova that VMware Workstation is happy to use.
With the vmdk, I was able to create a configuration with "Other 64bit" OS as type. It booted, but showed no graphical output. At a second look, somehow solely 256M RAM was configured, so I increased it to 2 GB and I got a Sculpt screen.
So, in principle the image can be booted with the VMware player when in vmdk format.
Cool. :)
Something else worth mentioning is the network adapter support. In VMware Workstation it defaults to emulating an "e1000", which *sounds* like it should work. Sculpt doesn't seem to like it though, which leaves the system without a working connection.
Changing the network adapter model to "e1000e" though works, with Sculpt happily using that without further drama. The network adapter model can only be changed by manually editing the VM definition file (.vmx) in the VM directory though, as the setting isn't made visible in the VMware Workstation GUI:
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000e"
Note that this change must be done when the GUI isn't running.
<snip>
I can reproduce the Problem 1-3, but there seems no rock solid way to use Virtualbox generated ova files with VMWare. Several workarounds are posted all over the net, e.g. [0], but all seem kind of quirky. I tried also to export the ova from Virtualbox in various formats and also the type of used disks, but none of the variants are accepted by the VMWare player.
The only long term solution would be to be to export a working VM as ova from a VMWare-Workstation installation, which we don't have nor intend to have.
Thanks heaps for taking the time to try stuff out. :)
I'll see if I can generate a matching ova that works ok, then throw it online somewhere in case other people want to try it out. :)
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift