Monthly Archive for November, 2008

VMware Player and Ubuntu 8.10 keyboard mapping issues

Published
by
Nalin
on November 12, 2008
in Linux/Unix
. 17 Comments

Yesterday I installed VMware Workstation 6.5 on my fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10. After powering on a Windows XP vm, I realized that I could not use the arrow keys properly. On hitting the left arrow key, start menu was being displayed and other arrow keys had similar issues. Also, using VMware player was completely impossible as ctrl-alt-del wasn’t working.

After searching around a bit I found that many others had faced similar issue. Apparently it is not a bug with VMware Workstation. Due to some updates to Ubuntu 8.10, the keyboard mappings were screwed up. I found good amount of information in the VMware communities forum.

To fix this issue, you simply need to run the following command,

echo 'xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true' > ~/.vmware/config

and if VMware Player/Server/Workstation was running, just restart it.

You should then be good to go…

Static IP address on Ubuntu 8.10

Published
by
Nalin
on November 8, 2008
in Linux/Unix
. 23 Comments

Last Friday I upgraded my install from Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on my office workstation and I noticed that I was unable to assign static IP to the machine. After reboot the netmask was getting messed up and reset to 22. Look at this bug for more info.

So, I ditched the native ubuntu Network Manager and installed wicd which is another open source network manager that works with Ubuntu. But after configuring wicd with the static IP, I had another problem. Everytime I restarted the machine, I had to manually start the wicd network manager. Instead of trying anything more with wicd, I decided to ditch a network manager altogether and just configure the files myself.

So, to get the network working with static IP, first remove the network manager (Many people have said that it is not necessary, but I prefer to remove it as I wont be using it anyway):

sudo apt-get remove --purge network-manager

Then modify the /etc/resolv.conf with the dns servers and domain names:

search foo.bar.com bar.com
nameserver 192.168.0.1
nameserver 192.168.0.2

Now, modify /etc/network/interfaces and add

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.10
netmask 255.255.252.0
gateway 192.168.0.253

Now, just restart the networking:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Obviously, you should figure out the netmask, gateway and name servers before you start these steps.

This is all that you need to do to configure the machine with a static IP.