Hello fellow Slackers,

I have installed Slackware with dropline gnome and kernel 2.6 (test26.s) into a virtual machine in vmware 5.0, on a windows xp host (because it is a business laptop).

But I'm having some problems:

1) my usb thumbdrive are not recognized when plugged in. No icon appears on the gnome desktop. It is not getting mounted:

- as a test I plugged the same usb stick in my desktop pc with also slackware and dropline gnome => drive appears on the desktop
- in a windows xp guest on the same vmware 5.0 the usb stick gets recognized
- is there anything, any trick to get the usb stick working in the slackware guest?


2) video's play in fast forward (gxine)

- on the same vmware 5.0 in a windows xp guest the video's play at normal speed
- what causes this problem?


3) the time in my slackware guest doesn't get synchronized with the windows host

- is there a solution to this problem?


thank you very much

I am not really a VMware expert (I dabble with QEMU a lot though)

Quite possibly you will have to tell VMware to make the physical USB device known in the Guest. Remember that VMware virtualizes a complete computer hardware, so the "real" hardware will not be automatically visible and useable.

You could try to disable your CPU's speedstepping (it is a laotop with speed-stepping, right?). When the host CPU changes it's clock speed, the guest will probably get confused and run too fast.

This will mostly be solved when you fix (2) above. But you could look into "ntpdate" and schedule
every few hours or so.

Eric

NTP requires a high-resolution real-time clock to make small adjustments to the system time standard. If you ever get more than ten seconds out-of-sync, ntp will terminate quietly.

ntpdate in a cron job is a good solution for many users, but it may cause slight gaps or overlaps in time when it adjusts your system's clock. This can be inconvenient for some purposes.

VMWare has an official whitepaper on the matter of time-keeping in guest OSs: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf

Assuming you are running Slackware 12 and a 2.6.21.5 kernel, add a new line to the lilo.conf below the "image=" line in the vm

append = "clocksource=pit nosmp noapic nolapic"

Then rerun lilo in the vm.

That should fix most if not all of the clock issue.