Maybe I'm doing something wrong...

[wolfwings]

...but every, single, god-damn time I try to install Ubuntu under VMWare Server... everything from square one of the installer to the final VM, no matter what I do, runs like ass.

I mean it, it feels like I'm trying to play Quake 3 over a satellite link, navigating the menu's on the Ubuntu install CD, Server or Desktop. Text-mode or not.

And even SSHing into the minimal box, typing has random pauses, pressing tab for auto-complete just flat hangs for ten or more seconds... it just makes no sense. Processes just hang and freeze with no warning, just sitting there spinning their wheels, then the VM decides to do more again...

This is regardless of if VMWare tools, Open-VM-Tools, or no VM tools are installed. Regardless of if it's 32-bit or 64-bit, LSILogic, BusLogic, or IDE hard drives, or anything else. What is Ubuntu doing to the kernel and everything else to make it run this poorly?

And CentOS I've just never been patient enough to sit through their freakin' DVD or full set of CD images just to get the VM installed... seriously, their packaging system is borked when it can't even understand the concept of 'just give me a minimal install CD' as a core concept. Hello? This isn't the Slackware days when we need to sneakernet everything to a friend's house... why do we need to download a couple of gigabytes just to install your OS? What is this, MicroSoft?

Then I compare everything to Gentoo's kernels, where things just scream along, my clock doesn't fall out of sync, the installer is under half a gig for the main install, and there's no cruft from the get-go... it just... baffles me. There's basically no chance Gentoo can ever get into Corp datacenter environments, but gah...

And yes, this is a kinda random rant. Still... gah!

Comments

[ssurgul.livejournal.com]

Well, according to one of my tech journal thingies, Torvalds himself is very annoyed with the latest releases of the Linux kernels as being bloated. I haven't tried to run Ubuntu in a VMWare shell lately, but when I was running it before,I didn't notice these problems. I have installed Karmic on a separate partition and other than the usual frustration with dual monitors, I hadn't noticed any issues.....

I'd give it a month or two and someone on the VMware forums will undoubtedly come up with some stunningly simple solution that will make no sense at all why it would work, but it works flawlessly.

[lionman.livejournal.com]

I happened to be talking with a client who runs VMware at home, and he commented that he's had some issues with different *nix installs under that. I didn't get into it too much with him, but he even has had some issues with apps under Vista on the VMbox.

[inaki.livejournal.com]

I had decent response from running Vmware server on windows, or ESX, but vmware server on linux was always insanely slow.. I finally ended up switching to KVM/QEMU for virtualization at home. I've had few issues since. =D

VMWare stuff

[texxgadget]

All the recent releases are full of bloatware.
Recent Ubuntu is really bad.
Remember VMWare is an earlt Redhat release as the master OS.