When VMware meets Ubuntu

VMware is a cool thing. Only after you have a few gigs of RAM and dual/quad-core, that is. Although it is a proprietary technology, it does have a free server version that is tremendously helpful to me, both in daily programming work and casual time-killing.

Ubuntu is another cool thing, which I enjoy using at the moment. But it has certain ``problems'' (or maybe ``features'' that I'm not used to). One of them pops up when I use VMware server 2.0 on Ubuntu 8.10.

In short, everything went fine (well, almost), except that I found my UP arrow key is gone, and my DOWN arrow key becomes the Windows key in my guest XP.

This was not a new problem. I had the same problem with previous versions of VMware and Ubuntu, but unfortunately forgot what the solution was. I had a one-line script that reads:

setxkbmap -rules xorg -layout "us" -model pc

which I remember solved one of the previous problems, but it didn't work anymore.

Googling on VMware and Ubuntu gives me a lot of information, so much so that I couldn't find relevant solution easily. Eventually I came across this howto:

How to VMWare Server 2.0 on Ubuntu 8.10

This basically says that adding the following line in /etc/vmware/config would solve the problem for VMware server (VMware Workstation requires a bit more work).

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = TRUE

This one-line solution solved my keyboard problem. I'm really glad that someone took the trouble to write this howto to help people like me, who have problems remembering every detail.