VMware Fusion 1.1 released

I'm frantic. Have Macbook osx, put in Fusion and Windows home (bought new), and suddenly after a few hours of the virtual portion working fine, it had "kernel panic" and crashed. Apple Store has it, says they've got Mac running, but now I'm afraid to try to re-load the VM and Windowsxphome. I chose not to use Bootcamp as I don't want to partition that much. I have 1 G Ram, 80 hd, so there's room. Anyone have any input for a newbie on Mac? Thanks.

@Greg G (21):

I believe Fusion doesn't actually delete the hard drive off your system; it just removes the reference to it from the .vmx file inside the virtual machine document.

You should be able to re-add it by shutting down your VM then editing the .vmx file by hand in TextEdit.

Now I remember why I haven't used VMware in a while. I threw a virtual hard drive in, made a 3rd, then, went to delete the second, and accidentally deleted the first (you know, the one with Windows on it) -_- It doesn't warn you or anything, and now it's gone. That irks me, because now I'm windows-less until I go home.

@Chris Niles (17),

/private/var/vm contains swap files created by Mac OS X. These are not files that VMware Fusion creates.

Please don't delete these files. :) They're owned by the operating system, and they're used to manage virtual memory.

Johnny Thrash,

A little program called AntiWPA 3 might help you out a bit. I had the same troubles with Boot Camp/Parallels, using the copy of WinXP I used on my last laptop before its mobo burnt out (may it rest in peace). Since that laptop's fried, installing the copy of Windows elsewhere is free game, but the activation guff got in the way. AntiWPA fools Windows into not checking whether it's activated, & I believe it also works with Vista. It's certainly supposed to; I just haven't verified it myself.

This might be against the DMCA, but I'm not in the US, & Australian copyright law doesn't forbid this. YMMV with regard to law.

Well, 6, there is 'getting round' activation, and that involves being around piracy.

9, XP Pro, if I remember from my forum trawling regarding activation on Parallels, has virtualisation in the EULA, whereas Home doesn't, meaning Pro you can virtualise, and Home you can't (although "can't" because it doesn't say you "can"). Now Vista I think may be adverse to virtualisation in the EULA, or maybe it's into it; can't remember.

7, you can't "activate twice", windows is tied to one computer generally.

And 16, probably the best solution for someone having trouble with the activation on Boot Camp not appearing to have been noticed whatsoever by Parallels or Fusion (and vice-versa) is that you have to look at the two profiles. If what Windows sees as the computer when using a virtual machine is sufficiently different to what it sees when it uses Boot Camp, it will think that they are separate machines (Correct logic, if a little flawed). What you want to do is try to get them as close as possible. I think in many cases (including my own) this will be purely to do with the RAM allocation. All that needs to be done is for the Virtual RAM to be at least half the Boot Camp RAM (or rather the computer's ram). So, in my case, all I needed to do was increase my Parallels' (now Fusion) RAM from 768MB to 1024MB).

Anyway, maybe that will help people with their Activation woes.

I don't know about other people who have installed it, but after installing I discovered that 51 GB of space on my HD had been eaten up. The culprits were a number of files located here /private/var/vm named "swap file 0" through "swap file 52" and one file named "sleep image" all of them averaging 1 GB in size (a few were 512 MB, 256 MB, or 128 MB). All of these files were created after I had installed Fusion 1.1, and all I did was try to create a new 10 GB Ubuntu VM (I couldn't, because Fusion said that I didn't have enough free space on my HD, there being just a little more than 8 GB available at the time).

Yes, I have emailed VMware tech support to find out what the heck is going on. I had the offending directory open (/private/var/vm) and brought up Time Machine, and there have been no files in this directory until after I installed Fusion 1.1)

Re: Win XP activation with Bootcamp and VMware

After reading through the VMware forums, I followed their instructions and had no problems:

1. Run Bootcamp and set up partition
2. Install Win XP on Bootcamp partition
3. Activate Win XP (I did mine online)
4. Install VMware on Mac OS
5. Create virtual machine based on Bootcamp partition
6. When the partition boots, do *not* activate it when the first notice comes up. Instead, decline to activate at that moment and proceed with installing VMware tools on the partition (VMware will prompt you to do so).
7. After installing VMware tools on the partition, activate XP (I called the automated 1-800 number and got my long code.)
8. Reboot partition - you're done! Two activations total, and I can run Win XP by itself or I can fire it up from the partition in Leopard.

@ Ish: Great question. I checked with Pat Lee and this is what he had to say,

"Experimental support for DirectX 9.0 3D graphics shows our continued commitment 3D. It allows customers to take advantage of the enhancements we continue to work on and allows VMware to get feedback from customers about potential issues with real world applications. A great example of a game that can be played now with experimental support for DirectX 9.0
is Microsoft Flight Simulator X. We look forward to hearing what customers find as well."

Ziv, all you need to do is download the new update from VMware's website and your current Fusion 1.0 serial number will work with it

http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/