Once the hardware on my home PC got upgraded I decided to run a couple of virtual machines on it at all times.
I’ve chosen VMware Workstation for the job, considering that, as a VCP, I have a license for it. Underneath it is Ubuntu Linux 11.04 64-bit.
Now, because I like it all to be automatic I’ve written this little script which uses the vmrun command to start and stop my virtual machines automatically during the boot-up and shutdown.
Recently, a Launchpad PPA containing Ubuntu packages has been created.
The packages have been tested to work on 32 and 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid), Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) and** Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)**.
They should also work on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric), but that one hasn’t really been tested yet.
Installation requires a few steps:
1 . Add the repositories and the PGP key to your system:
To add the repositories and the PGP key automatically type
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:almirdz/ppa
followed by
sudo apt-get update
to refresh the local packages list.
To manually add the repositories do the following:
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/almirdz-ppa.list
and put the links to the repositories for your Ubuntu version, eg.:
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/almirdz/ppa/ubuntu natty main
Then, add the PGP key to the list of trusted keys:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 3604082A
After all is done run
sudo apt-get update
to refresh the local packages list.
- Install the package by simply typing:
sudo apt-get -y install vmsctrl
That’s it, enjoy! ;-)
IMPORTANT: The path where virtual machines are stored, or the name of the virtual machine itself, must not contain spaces in order for script to work properly. Also, the path to the vmrun must be configured within your environment variables.
For any suggestions and bug reports please create an issue on GitHub.