Vmware Player Install Windows 11
Consuelo Dular
I am attempting to install the VMware Tools in a Windows 8.1 guest, but the Manage > Install VMware Tools... menu bar button is greyed out. I have downloaded the VMware tools for Windows (I can see it in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player\windows.iso) on the host computer. How can I fix this problem?
Even though it seems obvious now, the issue was that the Windows 8.1 guest did not recognize a CD/DVD drive. I had to add one manually in the virtual machine settings. I also found that although the Manage > Install VMware Tools... menu button was then enabled, I still had to manually mount the windows.iso file in the CD drive for the VMware Tools to display in "This Computer". Hopefully this helps someone.
For me what worked was to change the Floppy disk type to "physical". It doesn't make any sense because I obviously don't have a floppy disk connected to my laptop, but this post suggested it, and it worked.
Installation process.
Most of the time it's just hitting enter when required. There's one expected error where you have to press A. It's noted.
Once you're in windows, try the modded display driver, reboot a few times if it hangs and see if it starts working.
Notes
1) This was built with vmware player and is therefore built around whatever quirks it may have.
2) It should still work on real hardware because it doesn't modify anything important
3) The setup kinda assumes the drive won't be formatted at all. It will do the fdisk stuff and continue. It MAY work on a formatted drive. See #1
4) The modified svga driver is called SVGB256.drv. It shows in the standard "change video" area of the setup as "0 VMWARE Patched SVGA 1024x768x256". It is renamed so it doesn't interfere with the original SVGA256.drv or it's settings (ie so the iso can work on real hardware too)
5) The modded svga driver WILL disable filesharing. I found that little tip when I was wondering why it's so glitchy. It may... just freeze sometimes on boot. Not sure if that's the driver or just vmware. It worked after a few reboots on mine. It will glitch out if you use a dos window. Don't.
6) If the svga driver glitches to the point you can't handle, run the c:\windows\setup and change to vga to fix it.
7) The files currently in the win311 folder are modified setup text files, winfile (y2k update), and the TCPIP addon. These are free to distribute AFIK.
? No guarantees. No support. It works for me, if it doesn't work for you I don't really care.
9) Try with/adapt it to other versions if you want. Compare the infs. See the tricks that make it work.
10) I'll probably never run it again. It was just a puzzle to solve to automate it all to a fairly clean and working state.
I had a section of the install that unmounted the cd and just booted to dos with only smartdrv installed, remounted in VMware player and rebooted and it continued on its merry way. I think this was in between the dos and win install.
Because I chose to use SVGA and W311FW the login screen would cause the graphics corruption noted in the notes. I did at least figure out if you go change the IRQ for the AMD network card it will allow a graceful boot with SVGA + Network. That helped a lot and the only think that will bug out the screen is dos prompt.
Cheers. I know I said no support, but I do want it to work.
I'm kinda hoping people will see the inf changes and add more hardware/patches etc. Or maybe even fix some of the gaps in the bats. I don't really like the invalid media type error, but it's all I could do that worked.
I left notes in the tricky parts of the infs.
The basic "slipstreamed" template with TCP, is, I think, a good foundation.
There are many reasons to be grateful for the progress been made since Microsoft Windows 98, but sometimes we just want to peek back for nostalgic reasons. Recently I've found back a number of CD's that I got once as a bonus with a PC I bought in 1995. One of these CD's was 500 Nations of the series Microsoft Home. It's a multi-media CD about the native North American Indians, hosted by Kevin Costner.
Unfortunately this CD doesn't play in a Windows 8 system and therefor I decided to install Windows 98 SE in a VMWare Player. Since I had not any copy of a Windows 98 CD anymore I found one following this link
After downloading the ISO you just create a new virtual machine in your VMWare Player called Windows 98 SE. You create 2 CD players. One for the (virtual) Windows 98 ISO and one for playing the 500 nations CD (or any other physical CD's). It is helpful to have the Windows 98 (virtual) CD available after you have installed the operating system, for the installation of additional drivers you don't have to swap constantly the CD image in your CD player. The Windows 98 period was a period of Megabytes rather than Gigabytes so you don't have to reserve too much space for this.
Please be aware that appropriate additional software like Flash Player and Winzip can be found on the internet. The best way is to search for the proper releases with the browser of the host (your PC) and drag and drop the downloaded files to your VMWare Windows 98 and then install them there.
To have sound within Windows 98 it is important that you keep the setting to "Use default host sound card", for this will emulate a Sound Blaster Ensoniq AudioPCI soundcard. Don't set the sound to your own card, for it is likely that there are no drivers available for it.
It was a bit of a puzzle to have the right drivers for Windows 98 and the VMWare player, but here you have a link to the ZIP file with the drivers that I used. Any other Soundblaster drivers gave me a lot of blue screens in Windows 98.
You can always install the VMWare tools from the VMWare Player menu. The VMWare Tools make it also possible to drag and drop files from your host system (PC) to your VMWare Player. That is easy for many websites are not very friendly for old browsers.
If you have problems with the network regarding internet access, I have modified the DNS IP address to 8.8.8.8, which is Google. I have not plans to extend this experiment beyond entertainment level anyway, so the Google DNS is working just fine. To change the network settings you have to right mouse click on the "Network Neighborhood" and choose properties.
By default Windows 98 SE is installed with Internet Explorer 4.0. That was a modern browser at the time, but doesn't work well with modern websites and comes with a lot of JavaScript errors popups. So it is not bad idea to install the latest Firefox that was available for Windows 98.
Don't expect that websites work as smoothly like the current versions of Firefox. Old browsers have a slow JavaScript engine and there are a number of runtime errors that simply refer to code that was not supported at the time. And HTML5 support was not even invented then, neither was jQuery.
In my case I had to manually install the Ubuntu 16.04 distro because the windows store was not working on my pc which appears to be a common issue. I originally tried using Ubuntu 18 but it failed. Just for clarity, I determined which Ubuntu version to use by downloading the entire starter package, running the virtual machine in VMWare player and at the bash prompt I used the command:
I discovered that the VM image was using Ubuntu 16.04. I have a hunch that the URControl binary file was compiled using the gcc version common for the 16.04 release. Therefore, to make things compatible you will also want to use 16.04. However, in the future when the URSim is updated, you may have be required to upgrade to a newer version. You can always check which version to use by running the command above. Hopefully by that time someone at universal robots will read my crazy instructions and officially support running ursim on windows.
To manually install, I downloaded the appx file for 16.04, rename the file extension to zip. Extract it to a temp folder using 7-Zip or another tool of your choice. Then open and administrative command prompt and run ubuntu.exe. It will take a few minutes to install.
Open a command prompt, then type bash. You should now be running your Ubuntu distro. Now enter the following commands to apply the updates to your Ubuntu install. This will probably take a few minutes because there are a lot of packages to update.
Download URSim 5.2: URSim. Using 7-zip or another extraction tool of your choice, decompress the files into the /home/ur/ursim directory. Using your bash prompt run the install.sh using the following command.
./install.sh
In my case, the install script returned a few errors and ultimately failed, but not before it installed quite a few dependencies such as java. To finish the install process you will now need to run these additional commands:
The URControl binary executable does not run by default in WSL. In order to make it work you have to install QEMU Binary Format Support. Thankfully someone else figured this out because I never would have found this one on my own:
You will need to reactivate binfmt support every time you start WSL. To simplify this process, I created a .bashrc file in the ur home directory so this happens automatically everytime I login. I also export the DISPLAY variable so my screen is pushed to the Xming window.
As an alternative, it would also be possible to use WSL to only build and deploy the URCap from Windows, deploying to a URSim in a VM (using the ursimvm deployment method). In this way, you could use your favorite IDE directly in Windows, but execute URSim in virtual Linux.
For me personally, I have a much better user experience running everything on windows 10 and I use less overhead on my workstation by running things without the overhead of the complete Linux operating system. I feel more productive this way and I hope this post will help others!
Due to some permission issues I found the best way to get this to work was to setup ssh on WSL and alter the setup to run on port 2200 instead of 22. This means you can ssh into the WSL via 2200 and the localhost ip (127.0.0.1)
Used commands here
-diaries/ssh-on-windows-subsystem-for-linux/