Full screen WinXP in VMware 3

My preferred environment is FreeBSD with the Ion3 window manager; however, for my job I need to run MS Windows so I installed vmware3 from ports and made a WinXP Pro virtual machine. If you have used vmware on FreeBSD before, you may have had trouble getting it to work full-screen. There may be a solution, but I have not looked hard enough to find it yet. I came up with a workaround, though. Use rdesktop to connect through the virtual network interface and a run a full-screen RDP session!

I got the inspiration from doing the same thing with my office computer. Then I thought, why not connect to the virtual machine the same way? So I tried "rdesktop -a 24 -g 1280x1024 -D -K vmhostname" and it worked! Of course, I had to add an entry in my hosts file to map vmhostname to the I.P. address of the virtual machine and turn on Remote Desktop in Windows.

If you are not familiar with rdesktop, you can install it using ports. It is found at net/rdesktop. The "-a 24" specifies 24-bit color. The "-g 1280x1024" specifies the resolution of the session. The "-D" hides the the window manager's decorations. The "-K" keeps the window manager's keybindings so I can easily switch back and forth from Windows to FreeBSD. See the man page for other options.

The best part is that since it communicates through the virtual network connection, I can connect to the virtual machine without a network connection.

Edit: For windows, the guest OS will have to have to be Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP Pro, or Windows Server 2003 in order to be able to connect to it using RDP. Other OSes have other ways of using the GUI remotely (FreeNX, VNC, Citrix, etc).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Work standing up

Image
For heath and productivity reasons, I like to work standing up. My employer is rather slow at providing such accommodations, so I using the following setup made from printer paper: Then, someone raised a concern that in a minor earthquake, the monitor might fall onto my neighbor or out the window and requested I take down my setup. So I did, but then I found a solution to that problem by moving it over a bit on my desk.
Read more

Recording the iPhone screen and Mac screen at the same time in one video

Image
 I was browsing the Mac Power Users forum when I ran across this question : "I’m trying to figure out a way to record a demo of my web-based software simultaneously recording a desktop view and a mobile view. I basically want to use and interact with one browser window and have another browser window showing the same thing but with a mobile view. Thoughts?" I use QuickTime Player.  Connect your iPhone/iPad to your Mac with a lightning cable and start a New Movie Recording.  Pick your iPhone/iPad screen as the video source by clicking the little drop down arrow next to the red recording button.   You will get a window showing the contents of your device's screen.  There is no need to actually start recording this video. Leave that window open and start a New Screen Recording in QuickTime player at the same time.  Then just arrange your iPhone window and browser window on your screen and start recording.  You will see both things at the same time.  I uploaded a small video
Read more

Dual boot with Windows XP using BOOT.INI

I installed FreeBSD 6.1 on an IBM Thinkpad T30 today. I then installed Windows XP afterwards. Of course, Windows overwrote the boot sector so I could not get to FreeBSD. Thanks to a blog entry found at http://techheadaches.blogspot.com/2006/07/bootini-file-in-windows-2000-xp-server.html , I was able to add FreeBSD to the Windows boot menu. All I did was copy boot/boot1 from the FreeBSD CD to c:\freebsd. Then I added the following line at the end of C:\BOOT.INI c:\freebsd="FreeBSD 6.1" That did the trick!
Read more