Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2225 mails)

["Dominique Leuenberger" <Dominique.Leuenberger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > > On 11/4/2009 at 10:27, Roger Oberholtzer <roger@xxxxxx> wrote: 
> I use VMWare workstation. It comes with kernel drivers, and even
> automatically re-compiles/reloads them if I start VMWare after changing
> the kernel. All rather painless and automatic.
>
> My question is: what is the advantage of the open-vm-tools over the
> stuff that comes with VMware?
>
> I always uninstall the vm tools that come with openSUSE. They seems to
> get installed by default (in, say, 11.0). Is that still the case? It
> seemed to install only kernel modules. Which, on their own, are rather
> useless.

The kernel modules from open-vm-tools are only meant for vmware GUESTS. To my 
knowledge they were added in openSUSE 11.1 (but I can be wrong there..
time passes much faster than I can imagine).
if installed on a guest, the modules on their own are already very handy: think 
about:
- vmware guest running openSUSE 11.2 (kernel modules installed from the 
openSUSE Repository)
- opensuse publishes a kernel update -> due to the linking with the kmps, new 
kernel modules for vmware guest (NIC!) are automatically installed

would this not be the case, you could hardly do this upgrade on a remote 
machine without 'access' to the console (think esx, vmware server). Because
you'd have to log in to the guest and rebuild the kernel modules to get network 
access.

As said: the vmware-kmp that are shipped with opensuse are NOT meant for the 
host (that's why in openSUSE 11.2 they kmp is now called
vmware-guest-kmp-<flavor>; before it was vmware-kmp-<flavor> and I've seen 
plenty of users installing the package on their HOST, which is WRONG).

If the KMP get's installed automatically, that would be clearly a bug. As they 
are on the DVD though one that's hardly fixable with an update.

Dominique
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