VMware woes

Wow, two weeks since the last entry. I guess I haven't had much time for blogging lately.

Anyway, I finally fixed my problem with VMware Player today. After hosing my system a month ago, I hadn't bothered to try installing VMware Player again until about two weeks ago. I didn't figure it would be an issue, since I'd used it under Breezy before. But I was oh so very wrong.

VMware Player works perfectly on a vanilla Kubuntu Breezy installation. However, I had been keeping up with the updates. That was my mistake. It seems that the kernel 2.6.12-10 package is not compatible with VMware's kernel drivers. I had kernel 2.6.12-10 installed, and every time I tried to use a bridged network connection (I'm too lazy to figure out how to use NAT), something bad would happen. If I was lucky, the player would just crash. If I was unlucky, I'd get a kernel panic and the whole system would go down.
The solution? Downgrade to kernel 2.6.12-9. Yes, that's right - "downgrading" to a previous build of the same kernel version fixed the problem.

I think I've learned a valuable lesson from this. That lesson is: screw updates. I don't need to be on the bleeding edge. In fact, I don't need to be on any edge. It's safer to take a Windows kind of approach and use the same damned software until the next OS upgrade. In fact, come to think of it, I should write an entry on Windows and compatibility some time.

So that adventure was a huge waste of time and energy. I still don't know whose fault it was - Ubuntu's or VMware's - and, frankly, I really don't care. It's working now and I'm going to stop doing kernel updates because of this. Between this and my under-sized /boot partition that I don't feel like fixing, kernel updates just aren't worth the trouble.

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