Hello, any help with this issue is greatly appreciated!

I'm currently running Mandrake 9.2 w/ VMWare 4.0.5build 6030 on a Sony GRX-580 laptop. I have an onboard ethernet card (eth0) and a PCMCIA wireless network adapter (wlan0).

VMWare works fine, I've got XP Pro installed on it, and the networking works, but only if I choose NAT for the virtual machine. If I choose bridge, it says that eth0 is temporarily unavailable. Naturally, there's nothing plugged into eth0 so it will always be unavailable. The config program won't let me set the bridge on vmnet0 to anything besides eth0, so I tried manually editting the location file to wlan0 from eth0, but this doesn't work. I also tried adding vmnet2 as a bridge and specifying wlan0 as the interface, even though it tells me that only eth0 is available. Again it would not work.

Does anyone know of a way to get around this issue? I've been fiddling around with IPTables a little bit but to no avail as of yet. Ideally I think I need to redirect all traffic from eth0 to wlan0 but I'm not quite sure how to do this. Having the network work through NAT essentially isolates my virtual machine from the rest of the network, ruining the main benefit I was hoping to realize by using VMWare. I've googled and found some ideas (including a few on this site) but so far none has solved the problem.

Many Thanks,

Jim