I have run a variety of VMware desktop applications on a multitude of hosts, but recently I settled on Xubuntu with VMware Server for my work Windows XP instance.

Everything ran fine for a long time until all of a sudden keymappings went up the spout.  End did nothing, the keypad didn’t behave as expected, but worst of all the Windows Start key stopped working.  The last one was the worst, because I couldn’t get to use any keyboard shortcuts and I like keyboard shortcuts.

I fixed it using the following command:

echo ‘xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true’ > ~/.vmware/config

Everything is now working fine and I can only assume that a Xubuntu update caused an error/corruption somewhere.

I have been meaning to spend some quality time with Linux LVM. Some of the features that Linux Volume Manager offers (according to Wikipedia) are:

• Resize volume groups online by absorbing new physical volumes (PV) or ejecting existing ones
• Resize logical volumes (LV) online by concatenating extents onto them or truncating extents from them
• Create read-only snapshots of logical volumes (LVM1)
• Create read-write snapshots of logical volumes (LVM2)
• Stripe whole or parts of logical volumes across multiple PVs, in a fashion similar to RAID0
• Mirror whole or parts of logical volumes, in a fashion similar to RAID1
• Move online logical volumes between PVs

You can see why learning this might be attractive, especially for someone that runs Linux in Virtual Machines under VMware. I say especially in this scenario, because with the advent of ESX 3.5 Update 2 it is now so easy to expand virtual disks.

I found two great articles that helped me out no end in getting a better grip on LVMs. The first is an incredible article that talks about many different ways of managing disks in Linux, but specifically LVMs and can be found here. The second is tutorial style article that even has a downloadable VM that relates to the tutorial. The downloadable VM is a debian distribution that comes with disks that will be manipulated throughout the tutorial, truly excellent.

Here is a very interesting article about how you would go about mounting a LiveCD across the interenet:

http://vamosproject.org/InternetBoot

One day I seriously believe all Operating Systems will run in some derivative of this format.

This one is nice and easy to implement if you are running VMware Player/Workstation on Linux, but it does work on Windows using httpfs. It wasn’t as fast on Windows for me, by a long shot, but it still worked and illustrates the point really well.

Ubuntu have announced a new version of their Operating System that has been specifically designed for deployment as a virtual machine.

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