Resuming a VMware Virtual Machine: Could Not Open /dev/vmmon

I was tweaking Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid).  One step I took was to clean out old entries from the GRUB menu.  This involved removing some old kernels.  That process may have caused a problem for VMware Workstation 7.  When I tried to resume a previously suspended virtual machine, I got this error:

Could not open /dev/vmmon:  No such file or directory.  Please make sure that the kernel module `vmmon’ is loaded.

One source recommended adding some extra lines to the VMware startup script.  I killed VMware and tried that.  I typed “sudo gedit /etc./init.d/vmware and added those lines at the start of that file, right after the end of the introductory comments.  But it didn’t work, and I wasn’t surprised; the code seemed a bit scrambled.  I closed Workstation and tried “sudo vmware.”  But that didn’t help either.  What did finally solve the problem was a simple command:  “sudo service vmware start.”  Then I started VMware and was able to restore my virtual machine OK.

Compiz in Ubuntu 10.04: Same As It Ever Was

Following Gizmo’s Freeware list of tweaks, I decided to try jazzing up the visual appearance of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  To do this, I went into Ubuntu's System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager > Desktop.  Enable Desktop Cube; disable Desktop Wall.  Unfortunately, I went on to play with Effects at the same time, and managed to halfway freeze my system.  Having wasted hours on fooling with Compiz in previous years, I rebooted and went back to System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects > Normal.

Gizmo also described a Windows 7 Aero Snap tweak in which I could drag a window to the left or right side of the screen and it would automatically fill half of the screen.  To make this work, I installed wmctrl in Synaptic.  Then, in CompizConfig > General > Commands, I entered these commands:

• Command line 0:  WIDTH=`xdpyinfo | grep 'dimensions:' | cut -f 2 -d ':' | cut -f 1 -d 'x'` && HALF=$(($WIDTH/2)) && wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b add,maximized_vert && wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,0,0,$HALF,-1
• Command line 1:  WIDTH=`xdpyinfo | grep 'dimensions:' | cut -f 2 -d ':' | cut -f 1 -d 'x'` && HALF=$(($WIDTH/2)) && wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b add,maximized_vert && wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,$HALF,0,$HALF,-1
• Command line 2:  wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b add,maximized_vert,maximized_horz

Then, in the “Edge Bindings” tab, I changed None to Left (for command 0), Right (for command 1), and Top (for command 2).  I opted to disable the Flip Left, Flip Right, and Flip Up actions of Desktop Wall.  I wasn’t sure what that would mean.  I clicked Back > General > General Options > General tab > Edge Trigger Delay = 500 > press Tab button > Back > Close.  The way this actually worked, as I quickly found, was that whatever window was highlighted at the moment would go to the edge of the screen where I put the cursor.  Nice, but it kept the left panel from coming up (since I had set it to Auto-Hide), and then it made the bottom panel go to the top.

It all felt pretty flaky.  Since I couldn’t get back into the left panel I had to restart the system again.  Or, correction, the only button that worked was the Shut Down, so I did that, and then rebooted.  When the system came back up, the bottom panel was back in place, but I still could not open the left panel to get into System > Preferences and make changes to Compiz etc.  Following howefield’s advice, I hit Alt-F2, typed “gconf-editor” (I could also have typed gnome-terminal if I’d wanted Terminal) and went to /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0 and unchecked auto_hide.  I closed that, went back into Compiz Commands, and clicked the brush or broom icon at the left to remove each of those three commands.  I went into Synaptic and removed wmctrl.  I set the left panel back to Auto-Hide.  It would not come up again.  I restarted the system.

The restart option worked this time, at least to the point of taking me to the Ubuntu screen and then freezing.  Eventually, I punched the computer’s reset button.  I tried again with the left panel.  This time, I just turned off its Auto-Hide option and didn’t turn it back on.  I wondered if System > Administration > Update Manager would somehow fix this.  I ran a check for updates and got an indication that there were 21 of them.  I installed those and tried restarting the computer again.  This time, restart worked without having to punch the reset button.  I went back into Appearance > Visual Effects and set it to “None” rather than “Normal” or “Extra.”  I changed the properties of the left panel to Autohide again.  Now it would hide and unhide without a problem.  I went back into Visual Effects and tried the Normal setting.  It said, “Searching for available drivers.”  I opted to keep the settings.  I closed out of that and tried the panel again.  So, back in gconf-editor, I turned off Autohide again to make the panel visible; I went into Visual Effects and set it back to None; and now the panel was back.  So, OK, Compiz had screwed up the Normal setting so that I had to use the None option; but with the None option, everything seemed to be working acceptably.

That took care of this problem.  If the panel had still not worked, Howefield also offered the option of resetting the panels to the original default, which would have required me to reconstruct the way I had set them up.  Moral of the story, for me, on this work-oriented system, was to continue to avoid Compiz special effects.

Installing 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10 -- Additional Tweaks

In a previous post (and in a couple of comments after it), I described the steps I took to downgrade from 64-bit (x64) to 32-bit (x32) Ubuntu 9.10 (a/k/a Karmic Koala), including installation of VMware Workstation 7 and other programs.  This post describes further installation and adjustment steps that I took as time went by.

To make more vertical space, I moved Ubuntu's top panel to the left side of the screen.  To do this, I right-clicked on the panel and went to Properties > General tab > Orientation.  While I was there, I also unchecked Expand and checked Autohide and Show hide buttons.  In previous installations, I had found that sometimes a panel would misbehave on startup.  To fix that, I would just come back to these options and check and then uncheck Expand.  (To get to these options on the revised left panel, I would right-click the Hide button at the top of the panel.)  I had experimented with moving the bottom panel to the right side of the screen, but there were some panel items (e.g., date, weather) that required reading, and reading was easier when I left them on the bottom.  I made the bottom panel more consistent with Windows XP by moving the shutoff button to the bottom left corner, from its original location on the top right corner, and also by moving the date to the bottom right corner.  To move these items from the (formerly top) left panel, I right-clicked on them and chose Remove From Panel.  Then I went to the bottom panel and used right-click > Add to Panel and selected Clock and Shut Down.  To relocate them on the bottom panel, I used right-click > Move, and then put the hand on the part of the panel where I wanted them to be and clicked again. To move items that were already on a panel, I had to right-click > uncheck Lock to Panel, then move the hand to the panel location where I wanted the item, click there, and go back in and Lock to Panel again.  To move some items, I had to look for the icon consisting of three tiny grey marks and right-click on that.  That included, on the bottom panel, the entire set of buttons for currently open programs.

While I was revising panels, I added Drawer to the left panel.  Then I right-clicked on Drawer and chose Add to Drawer.  This was for infrequently used items that needed to be horizontal (for reading), and that therefore belonged in a Drawer on the left rather than bottom panel.  For now, the only such item was Character Palette.  On the rough principle that the left panel was for applications and the bottom panel was for WinXP imitation and for everything else, I also added Force Quit to the left panel.  To the bottom, I added Disk Mounter (in a Drawer), Lock Screen, Sticky Notes, and Weather Report.  For some of these items, there were Preferences that could be adjusted. There were some items that could not be added to panels in the normal way.  Specifically, I wanted a copy of the Places > Computer icon on the left panel.  To get it there, I went to Places > Computer and click-dragged the icon to the panel.

I ran into a problem with VMware Workstation 7 performance.  I had downgraded to the 32-bit of Workstation, so that it would run on 32-bit Ubuntu.  It seemed that the lower RAM capacity of 32-bit operating systems might be to blame.  I worked through that problem in a separate post.  The solution was to use a PAE kernel, which can recognize more RAM.  Otherwise, the next major step in this process was to upgrade, some months later, to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).