Full Disk in Ubuntu 9.04

I was using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). I started getting error messages indicating that my Linux program partition (mounted as / ) was full. For example: "Error while copying to 'tmp'. There is not enough space on the destination." This surprised me, because when I went to Gparted (Ubuntu > System > Administration > Partition Editor, installed via System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager), I saw that the Linux root partition was 107GB, of which 102GB was used and only 5GB free.

Andre Mangan advised typing "sudo find / -type f -size +100000k" in Terminal to see what large files I had (with the option of changing the 100000 value). I added a zero, so I was looking for files of roughly 1GB and larger in size. This searched everywhere, including on my mounted data partitions (in /media and/or /mnt), so probably I should have unmounted those before searching: it included .avi (video) and other large but known files. It didn't seem to turn up any unexpected large files, though.

I posted a question on this. Meanwhile, I was noticing all kinds of errors resulting from this problem. Once I closed Gparted, I was not able to start it again: I got an error message, "Failed to run /usr/sbin/gparted as user root. Unable to copy the user's Xauthorization file." I got the same message when attempting to run Synaptic and other programs. I suspected this was also the culprit behind the recent failure of certain rsync (backup) jobs. Whatever was filling space on my drive was still operating; I had had 5MB free just a half-hour earlier.

Drs305's response to my post pointed me to his tutorial on disk space problems. Following the relevant portions of that tutorial, I first unmounted all partitions other than the active root ( / ) partition by typing "sudo umount -a". Then I typed "sudo find / -name '*' -size +1G" and saw that the /media/OFFSITE folder, which was supposed to be a reference to my external OFFSITE hard drive, was instead referring to a folder on the root partition. No wonder I had been having problems with my external backup! I deleted /media/OFFSITE and then typed this:

sudo find / -type d -name '*Trash*' | sudo xargs du -h | sort

This seemed to show me that there were lots of files in the /root trash folder(s), which I probably had never emptied. They appeared to be in /root/.local/share/Trash/files, and maybe elsewhere. To delete root trash, I typed "gksudo nautilus" and, in Nautilus (i.e., File Browser), I made sure to check View > Show Hidden Files. Then, in that session of Nautilus, I navigated to File System /root/.local/share/Trash. I selected the Trash folder and hit Shift-Delete. This said, "Are you sure you want to permanently delete 'Trash'?" I said Delete! with joy. It notified me that it was deleting about 37,000 files. So, duh, this could have been part of the problem. Then I noticed that the faster way to check disk space was, instead of using GParted, to type "df -Th | grep -v "fs".When it was done, I refreshed GParted. Now it showed only 37GB used. Still a lot!  So I thought I should probably pursue some of the other options described in the tutorial.

Before I could do that, though, I ran into a separate problem: my programs drive completely wiped itself out, so I had to restore Ubuntu from a backup.

Configuring 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 with Vista Dual-Boot

I had a Compaq CQ60-420US laptop. It had come with Vista pre-installed. I didn't like that, so I wiped it off. This led to a whole ordeal in trying to get the hard drive to work with WinXP, for which I had developed lots of tricks and tweaks. That effort ultimately failed, and I wound up with Vista back on the thing after all. I had wanted to get away from dual booting, but I still needed some flavor of Windows for the occasional hardware interaction, e.g., updating the BIOS and other firmware. So for now, I was going to leave Vista in place and set up a 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) dual-boot with it. This post describes the process of setting up that dual boot. A review of some guides gave me the general impression that installing a Vista-Ubuntu dual boot was much like installing a WinXP-Ubuntu dual boot, unless you used the wubi alternative. The approach I took was as follows:

1. With Vista already installed, insert the Ubuntu program CD, reboot, and go through the ordinary installation sequence. If you do nothing, the CD will pretty much take you right to the Install icon. If your BIOS isn't set to boot from CD before hard drive, hit F2 or Esc or Del or F8 or whatever key it is that gets you into your BIOS setup, promptly after the computer first starts up, and adjust the boot priority there.
2. You may find that the bootable Gparted CD provides a clearer view of hard drive partitions than does the partitioner in the Ubuntu installer. If the partitioning step leaves you dazed and confused, you may want to back up, download Gparted, burn yourself a CD, boot with that first, set up your partitions as you like, and then come back into the Ubuntu installation process. Note: if you're going to run Windows in a virtual machine, you may want to give it an NTFS partition somewhere, so you have a place to store data. Windows can't read Linux (e.g., ext3) partitions.
3. After the initial installation, make sure that Vista starts up OK. No point spending hours refining a system that isn't ready for prime time. Then restart and go into Ubuntu, and make various adjustments, including these: (a) Nautilus > View > Show Hidden Files. (b) Nautilus > Edit > Preferences > Behavior > Always open in browser windows.
4. Go through the steps described in my previous post on configuring Ubuntu 9.04 (including comments). That post updates the first part of an earlier post on how to configure 9.04. After running updates, type "sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst" and put # symbols in front of each line (i.e., older Ubuntu kernels) that you don't want to appear in the GRUB menu.
5. Before continuing with items in that earlier post (as explained in more detail there), I initially thought that the next step would be to install and configure Thunderbird (just plain old thunderbird, not mozilla-thunderbird) and Lightning-extension via Synaptic. But then I decided I would just use web-based e-mail and calendaring (probably via Gmail) on the laptop, and would download and archive my e-mails solely on my desktop, thereby sparing the need to synchronize the two computers.
6. Now refer back to the earlier post, to install programs that came via individual downloads rather than through Synaptic. For me, these included Google Desktop for Linux, Adobe Reader, and VMware Workstation 6.5.3.
7. I installed .deb files by double-clicking on them in Nautilus, and .bin and .bundle files by running "chmod +x [filename]" and then "sudo ./[filename]." I didn't have any .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 files to install this time, but if I had, I would have moved them to my /home/[username] folder, navigated there in Terminal, and then used a tar unpack command (e.g., tar -vxf [or tar xvfz] filename.tar.gz, or tar xvf filename.tar, or tar yxf filename.tar.bz2).
8. To install Google Earth, continuing to follow my previous notes, I typed two lines: "wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/current/GoogleEarthLinux.bin" and then "sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin." This gave me a Google Earth installation, but with flickering and basically nonfunctioning display. I tried System > Administration > Update Manager, and at first that program assured me that my system was up-to-date; but when I made it check again, it reported errors related to Wine and Opera. I ignored these for now, since they did not seem relevant. People seemed to be experimenting with the flickering video problem in Google Earth. There was a relatively complex tutorial that apparently fixed it in some cases, at the risk of messing up the system. Choosing instead an easy fix that seemed to work for some, I went to System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects and downgraded from Extra to Normal. That didn't help. Following another tip, I downgraded further, from Normal to None (i.e., no visual effects), and also turned off the Atmosphere feature in Google Earth (View > Atmosphere). That fixed it.
9. To configure Firefox, I went to another computer and used the FEBE extension to make a full backup of that machine's Firefox installation. I copied the folder containing the FEBE backup to the target computer (i.e., the one where I've been doing all this installation stuff). I installed FEBE in Firefox on the target machine, restarted Firefox, started to watch the tutorial on restoring with FEBE, turned to the instructions on manually restoring with FEBE, and then took these steps on the target machine: Close Firefox. Go to the FEBE backup directory (i.e., the one where I put the FEBE backup folder that I copied over from the other computer). Copy its .fbu file (in my case, profileFx3{default}.fbu) and rename the copy as a .zip file. I called it FEBErestore.zip. Extract the contents of the .zip file (creating, in my case, a folder called FEBErestore). Move the contents of the FEBE restore folder to the Firefox profile folder, which I found in Nautilus at File System/home/ray/.mozilla/firefox/[random name].default. In my case, for example, I moved the contents of the FEBErestore folder to this .default folder. When it told me that a folder already exists, I said Merge All, and Replace All for the "file already exists" message. During this process, I got an "Error while copying 'febe.jar'" message. The details of the error said "Permission denied." I canceled and tried again as root (type "sudo nautilus" and then do the move in the Nautilus session that opens that way). That worked. Then I closed everything else and started Firefox and, yeah, it looked like all the extensions were there, configured and everything.

This was the extent of my Ubuntu configuration for now. During these processes, I came across some miscellaneous issues:

• I wanted to change login passwords. This, I thought, would be under System > Administration but no, eventually I found it instead under Applications > Accessories. Double-clicking on that did not work; I had to right-click and choose Change Password; but then the password that I changed it to did not work for login. I thought the problem might be that I hit Enter instead of clicking on the button after doing the change; that is, possibly the default was Cancel rather than Change. I could not tell; neither button seemed to be highlighted by default. So then it turned out that I had changed the password to unlock the keyring, rather than the password to log in. It looked like I had changed that properly, second time around; but still no.
• As in other Ubuntu installations, panels did not readily allow me to move icons to the locations I would designate. Sometimes they would not move; sometimes they would not go exactly where I indicated. On the bottom panel, for example, I could not rearrange them in the far right corner. It turned out to be easier to move things *out of* the corner (where the Windows system tray would be) than to move them *into* the corner. It turned out that I had to unlock every item that I wanted to drag another icon past. Tooltips came up, irritatingly enough, when I was trying to move icons, making it difficult to see what I was doing.
• The bottom panel failed to show icons or buttons for my currently running programs. The solution was to right-click on the bottom panel, choose Add to Panel, and choose Window List. But then, on reboot, it did not work again. I fixed it by right-clicking on the end of the Window List item on the bottom panel and checking Lock to Panel.
• When trying to view the contents of some hard drive partitions, such as a partition I called DATA, I got "Cannot mount volume. You are not privileged to mount the volume 'DATA'. Following my previous notes, in Terminal I typed "sudo mkdir /media/DATA," thinking that perhaps I had not yet created the mount point, but this gave me "cannot create directory `/media/DATA': File exists." I typed "sudo nautilus," went to File System > /media/DATA > right-click > Properties, and verified that I (i.e., user "ray", not just root) had full permissions. I typed "sudo fdisk -l" (that's an L, not a one) to get a list of devices. That showed that the DATA partition was being recognized as an NTFS device at /dev/sda4. I typed "sudo gedit /etc/fstab" and saw that there was no line in the fstab file for /dev/sda4. Following some notes from a few months earlier, I typed "sudo ntfs-config." (Note that this was one of the programs I had installed from Synaptic, above.) This detected the VISTA programs partition (i.e., drive C in Windows), but not the DATA partition. I ran ntfs-config again. This time, it didn't mention the VISTA drive, but as before it did give me the option to enable an internal drive. I accepted that. Now I saw that there was indeed a line for the DATA partition as well. While I was here, I used blkid to find the UUIDs for each partition (e.g., "sudo blkid") and replaced that portion of the relevant line in fstab. For example, the line that previously read "/dev/sda1 /media/VISTA ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0" now began with "UUID=19142FAA142F8D35" instead of "dev/sda1." Following the format of other lines in fstab, I preceded this one with a line that said, "# Entry for /dev/sda1 : " and followed a similar procedure for the DATA partition. I rebooted and was now able to view the NTFS-formatted VISTA and DATA partitions. On second thought, I went back into fstab and removed the line for the VISTA partition, since I didn't expect to need it normally in Ubuntu and didn't want to expose it to accidental deletions and such.

This seemed to give me a basic working dual-boot 64-bit system. The next step, for me, was to configure VMware, so that I could run any Windows program within Ubuntu.

Recognizing Partitions Automatically in Ubuntu 9.04

In Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), disk partitions normally remain unmounted until you mount them manually. One way to do this is to start Ubuntu's File Browser (also known as Nautilus). You can do this by choosing the Places > Computer menu option. In File Browser, just double-click on the drive you want to mount, and its name will appear under the File System > Media folder there in File Browser. You can also mount drives by typing commands into Ubuntu's command-line window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal). First, type "sudo mkdir /media/[drivename]" to create a mount point. After doing this for all unrecognized drives, type "sudo mount -a".

But instead of doing this sort of thing, I wanted the system to recognize my drives on bootup, so that I would not have to mount them manually each time I rebooted. In my first approach to this problem, I typed "sudo ntfs-config." This approach worked OK on one computer, where I was doing a clean installation -- where, that is, I had formatted the partition before installing 9.04 on it. But on another computer, I installed 9.04 on top of 8.04 without formatting the partition. This was advantageous in that it preserved lots of files and settings from before. The drawback was that I was running into funky problems with ntfs-config.

On this system, I got an error message when I ran ntfs-config. The message was, literally, "Error : An error occured when trying to configure [partition name], please retry. Thanks." (For those who are searching with the correct spelling, let me retype that error message: "Error: An error occurred when trying to configure . . . ." When I tried to examine the partition in GParted (i.e., System > Administration > Partition Editor (see above)), I got this: "Warning: Unable to read the contents of this file system!" The partition had been available a minute earlier, when I had booted into Windows XP, and I had shut down WinXP normally before rebooting into Ubuntu. So I didn't think the partition was truly hosed.

I found a very, very long thread on the subject, but post no. 2015 in that thread said the thread's advice was outdated for purposes of newer versions of Ubuntu. In another thread, someone said they got this error message after installing a newer version without formatting the partition, and solved it by deleting the mount points. I had a fresh backup of the partition in question, so I tried taking that approach. First, I opened File Browser and went to File System > Media > CURRENT. File Browser said that partition was empty. When I right-clicked on it, however, File Browser didn't give me an option of deleting it. Its Properties said it was owned by root, so I logged in as root (see above), typed "cd /media", typed "dir" to make sure CURRENT was there, typed "dir CURRENT" to make sure it was empty, and then typed "rm -r CURRENT" to delete it. I restarted the system, started File Browser, went to Computer (in the Tools bar), double-clicked on CURRENT, and it was there, with all its contents. CURRENT was formatted in ext3 (i.e., Linux). I had another partition that was having the same problem. It was formatted in NTFS (i.e., Windows). But now that I had rebooted, it too was available and looking fine.

I dropped this issue for the time being. Next day, when I rebooted, I found that, predictably, the various partitions were not mounted. In Terminal, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/fstab." My fstab file did not show the partitions I wanted to be mounted automatically. I reviewed one of my old posts on ntfs-3g. It seemed to say that ntfs-config was the solution. I tried running ntfs-config again. This time, it ran. It recognized two NTFS partitions. Now I just had two ext3 partitions to set up for automatic mounting. I went back into fstab and saw the lines that ntfs-config had added. I hadn't thought to save the fstab file from my previous installation; it would have been handy to copy over the relevant lines. From the previous post, I gathered that the trick was to write something like this in fstab:

/dev/sda3 /media/VMS ext3 defaults 0 0

for the VMS partition, and likewise for the other ext3 partition. I double-checked that I had the right device addresses by checking them in System > Administration > Partition Editor (i.e., GParted). I rebooted, but the ext3 partitions were still not automounted, though the NTFS partitions continued to be automounted nicely. I didn't know why the line just shown, for the VMS ext3 partition, did not work in fstab now; according to the old post, it had worked in Ubuntu 8.04. Ubuntu documentation said something about pysdm, so I looked into that. They suggested typing this into Terminal:

sudo apt-get install pysdm

but I saw it was available in Synaptic (i.e., Ubuntu's System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager menu pick), so I used that instead to install pysdm. I typed "pysdm" at the Terminal prompt, but got an error message indicating that I had to have root privileges, so I tried again with "sudo pysdm." (Also available via System > Administration > Storage Device Manager.) That gave me a Storage Device Manager (SDM) window that listed some, but not all, of my partitions. I noticed that, if I started pysdm while I still had the foregoing /dev/sda3 line for my VMS partition in my fstab file, SDM would not give me an option of configuring the VMS partition; but if I deleted that line from fstab and then started pysdm and clicked on sda3, SDM would give me a "Configure now?" dialog with the message, "/dev/sda3 hasn't been configured. Do you want to configure it now?" I said OK. I told it to set the mount point to File System > Media > VMS. Then I clicked on the Assistant button and saw that the option was checked that said "The file system is mounted at boot time." I also checked the option that said, "Check file system at mount time" on the options dialog's Mounting tab. I didn't change any other options. When I checked OK to leave Assistant, I saw an error message in Terminal: "wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda3, missing codepage or helper program, or other error." I went back into Assistant and removed the "Check file system" option I had just checked. This time, when I left Assistant, I got Warning messages that said, "Unknown option: rw" and "nouser is not suitable for user" and "Unknown option: async." I clicked on the "Set defaults" button in SDM and then clicked Apply. This produced no additional Warning messages in Terminal. Trying once more, I just went into Assistant and immediately executed, and this did produce the same Warning messages, plus an additional one that said, "Unknown option: defaults." I tried just emptying out the Options box altogether in SDM. Then I clicked Apply. I did the same with the other ext3 partition that was not yet mounting automatically. I restarted the system.

It occurred to me that I may not have restarted the system previously, but may merely have logged out and logged back in. Ubuntu 9.04 seemed to require two steps to reboot, and it seemed that I had forgotten to take that second step last time around. This occurred to me right around the time when I tried to restart the system and found that it froze with a black screen. Evidently my fstab file was not presently in an acceptable form. I punched the computer's reset button and rebooted with the Ubuntu installation CD, chose the "Try Ubuntu" option, and edited fstab as above. (Note that there's an fstab on the CD too; make sure you're editing the one on the hard drive.) I saw that I had failed to add the preferred mountpoint for one of my ext3 partitions: it said "/media/sdc5" instead of "/media/CURRENT." I fixed that and rebooted without the CD. This time, the system booted OK. But those two ext3 partitions were still not automounted.

In File System > media (i.e., /media), I noticed that there was a mount point for the VMS partition, but it had nothing in it. I typed "dir" to make sure there was nothing there, and then typed "sudo rm -r VMS" to delete it. I also deleted the "sc5" mountpoint mentioned above. In File Browser, I clicked on the Computer button at the top and then double-clicked on each of these two partitions (i.e., VMS and CURRENT) to create mountpoints (i.e., /media folders) for them. I tried rebooting again. They still weren't automounting, and the mount points I had created for them were gone, as I should have expected. Incidentally, at this point I discovered that the custom was apparently to mount fixed hard drives at /mnt, and use /media for removable hard drives.

About this time, I discovered that I had commented out the lines added by SDM (i.e., I put # signs (also called hash marks) in front of each of those lines). I forgot. I had done that to troubleshoot fstab, and then didn't go that route after all, and forgot to remove them. So I removed the hash marks now and rebooted. But that wasn't the solution. I re-ran SDM, went through more or less the steps described above, and rebooted. This time, it worked: the partitions were automounted, and their contents were visible. Not sure exactly what was different this time, but something was. So I guess the conclusion is, if it doesn't work in SDM the first time, tinker around for a while, reboot a couple of times, try SDM again, and reboot.

Installing 64-bit VMware Workstation 6.5.2 on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04

In 2008, I had gone through quite an ordeal to install VMware 6 on 64-bit Ubuntu. What a difference a year makes! By now, VMware was now up to 6.5.2, and Ubuntu was up to 9.04. Also, I had a much better idea of what I was doing. The installation was vastly easier as a result. After installing and configuring Ubuntu, I downloaded the latest version of 64-bit Workstation in .bundle form, copied it to /home/ray (where "ray" was my username), and installed by navigating to that location in Terminal and typing "sudo sh [filename].bundle." In this case, the filename was VMware-Workstation-6.5.2-156735.x86_64.bundle. (To uninstall, go to /home/[username] and type "sudo ./[filename].bundle -uninstall." Stop after the uninstallation portion of the program sequence.) I skipped the "Path to Eclipse directory" option. The installer ran. I got "Installation was successful." To configure Workstation, I typed "sudo /usr/bin/vmware." This opened Workstation as root administrator. I was then able to set Edit > Preferences. The next step was to set up virtual machines (VMs). I had two sources of VMs. First, I had a Windows XP installation that I wanted to convert to a VM. I had been using this installation every day for several weeks and had installed a bunch of software on it. Also, I had been having some weird freezes in Adobe Acrobat, and I wanted to see whether these were caused by the hardware on that particular computer. I figured that if I didn't get the crashes when I ran Acrobat on virtual hardware in a VM, then the physical hardware probably was the culprit. Second, I had some preexisting VMs that I had been using on my previous VMware installation. They had worked reliably, and they were also quite a bit smaller (and would therefore load and back up faster) than the 35GB I had allocated for this latest installation. So, first, to convert that WinXP installation, I booted into Windows, and downloaded, installed, and ran the latest version of VMware Converter. (At this point, that version was 4.0.0.) In this version, I clicked on "Convert Machine" to run it. The first time through, I then ran "Configure Machine" to make it bootable; but I don't believe I did run it when I tried again a second time. In both instances, I indicated that I was talking about VMware Workstation, not a VMware Infrastructure VM. In case it is indeed necessary to run the Configure Machine process, here are the steps in that processs. Configure Machine brought me a message that I needed Sysprep files. These came in different versions, depending on whether the computer had been updated for XP Service Pack (SP) 2 or SP3. (They were supposedly also available on the CD at \Support\Tools\deploy.cab. If you use the CD, remove it before proceeding with the following steps.) I had installed SP3, so I used the instructions for that service pack. For my purposes, the steps to install the Sysprep files were as follows:

(1) Save a copy of deploy.cab on the hard drive, so I wouldn't have to look for it if I didn't like my first VM and needed to recreate it. (2) Double-click on deploy.cab to open it up. (A .cab is a "cabinet," i.e., storage, file.) (3) Copy its files named sysprep.exe and setupcl.exe to a folder named C:\Sysprep. (4) In C:\Sysprep, double-click on sysprep.exe. Select "Don't reset grace period for activation" and set Shutdown mode to "Shut down." Then click Reseal. This should give you a "Sysprep is working" message. It didn't work right for me the first time, but after rebooting it did its deed in just a few seconds.

On the second run-through, I rebooted into Ubuntu, then continued with the following steps. I started Nautilus as root (i.e., "sudo nautilus") and changed the permissions (right-click > Properties) of the /home/ray/.vmware folder so that the user named ray (as distinct from root) had permission to create and delete files in that folder. Then I started the VM, but I got "Error: Cannot open file '/home/ray/.vmware/preferences': Permission denied. Unable to read user preferences." Fortunately, time heals all wounds. When I came back to the installation process at this point, a couple of weeks had gone by and I really had no idea what I was doing previously, but I could see that problem just described seemed to have gone away. So if this happens to you, the recommended solution would be to put your computer in a closet and go on vacation. When I got back to it, I had a new problem. The problem was that my CNN news report videos weren't playing. For this, the recommended solution was to install 64-bit Adobe Flash Player. I followed the instructions to download that. It was a tar.gz file, and this time, instead of using the "tar -zxf filename.tar.gz" command that I had used previously, I tried right-clicking and selecting "Open with Archive Manager." (Not sure if that option had existed in prevous versions of Ubuntu.) This showed me a file called libflashplayer.so. I right-clicked and extracted it to the desktop. I used Synaptic to completely uninstall nsplugin. In File Browser (Nautilus), I enabled "Show hidden files" and moved libflashplayer.so to the .mozilla/plugins folder in my Home directory. That worked for many people, but not for me. I tried again as root (i.e., type "sudo" at the Terminal prompt before any other command -- in this case, "nautilus") and moved it instead to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, as one commenter on that instruction webpage suggested. I also tried "sudo killall firefox." Still no luck.

Here, for posterity, were a couple of random notes that I made while I was attempting this installation:

As root, set VM > Settings. As root, in the VMs, type "/dev/audio" in place of "Auto Detect" in VM > Settings > Hardware > Sound Card.

To install VMware Tools in a VM, first use VM > Install VMware Tools. Then, in Windows Explorer, go to drive D and run Setup. May have to insert WinXP CD in the physical CD drive during this process. Better if you've copied the WinXP CD's i386 folder to the VM previously; can just point there for some installation files.

At about this point, I gave up on trying to get VMware to work on that machine. I turned instead to the machine where I had been running Ubuntu 8.04 with VMware Workstation for the past year. I did an upgrade installation of Ubuntu 9.04 on that machine and installed Workstation 6.5.2 there. I used pretty much the approach described above. The upgrade type of installation seemed to save a lot of steps, though; I went right into using Workstation without much delay at all.

I did continue to have a problem, in the new setup, that I had had on that same machine in Ubuntu 8.04. The problem was that if I ran more than one VM at a time, the whole computer would crash when I tried to suspend or close on of them. On the new installation, I didn't get crashes, but VMware became nonworking all the same. I would just get a mostly blank white screen. I couldn't figure out a solution, so I posted a question on this problem.

While I was waiting for someone to suggest an answer, it occurred to me that maybe I could open a separate session of VMware Workstation for each of my VMs. In early testing, at this point, it appears that having eight sessions of Workstation open at once (even if nearly all of the VMs themselves are shut down or suspended) does degrade performance in any given VM. I will be experimenting with how many VMs I can have open without too much of a performance penalty. This approach does seem, so far, to solve the problem of Workstation crashing or becoming unresponsive.