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I had a small issue getting vmware tools from VMware 2.0 beta 1 working under OpenSolaris 2008.05. I don’t know if it’s an issue in previous versions of either software.

First, when installing OpenSolaris 2008.05, choose VMware setup options for “Solaris”, and either 32-bit or 64-bit depending on your preference. I wanted, 64-bit, but “Other / Other 64-bit” setup option resulted in strange errors at vm boot time.

You can now mount the VMware tools via the menu option “Virtual Machine” -> “Install VMware Tools”. A CD icon will appear on your desktop. Double-click the CD, and the tar file inside there. Untar the files onto your desktop. Open a terminal. Become root. Before you run the script, we need to create some directories to help the installation complete.


# su -
(password)
# mkdir -p /usr/dt/config/Xsession.d
# mkdir -p /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d
# cd ~/Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib
# ./vmware-install.pl
(run the script)
# cd /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d
# ln -s /usr/dt/config/Xsession.d/9999.autostart-vmware-user.sh


What we did above was create and old directory the install script wanted to use, a new directory that will be used by gdm (the login manager), and then linked the files accordingly.

If you log out (or reboot), and log back in, you will now see:


$ ps -ae |grep vmware
794 ? 0:03 vmware-m
868 ? 0:07 vmware-g
12428 ? 0:04 vmware-u

The vmware-u is the vmware-user process that needs to get launched, so that features like autoresize and copy & paste will work.

Now — on to play with ZFS!

So, pretend you have:

• a new Mac laptop with a fast hard drive, but one that is smaller than all the data you need to backup
• A backup hard drive you’ve used on Windows and Linux, but is formatted NTFS, and is much larger than your new laptop’s HD
• You have files named on your system that needs to be backed up that aren’t kosher for NTFS

So, being a Linux geek, you realize “Ha! I’ll just tar my files up, copy it to the backup drive, over to the new system, and untar.”

Yes - you do just that, but then you need to use your laptop for work; so instead of waiting to untar the file, you copy the very large backup tar files from the external HD to your new laptop.

Now, here’s the problem: you can’t untar the entire tar flle w/o running out of space. What do you do? Un-tar a bit at a time; delete; continue.

Untar a bit of the archive you want, delete it from the tar, and continue until you have more space on your HD than the rest of the tar file.

# tar xf MYBACKUP.tar This/directory/I/want
# tar --delete --file=MYBACKUP.tar This/directory/I/want


This method works surprisingly well, considering the tar file crossed all three major operating systems.

If you are unsure of what is inside the archive, you can use:

# tar --list --file=MYBACKUP.tar