On 11/4/2009 at 10:27, Roger Oberholtzer <roger@opq.se> 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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org