[Bump!]
PluMGMK, you might remember that I was trying to get SVGA in Mandrake to work in VirtualBox awhile back with no success.
Well, I can now say that I’ve finally got it working flawlessly in full 1280x1024!
I did have some trouble with it though – I had to find an older version of VMware Tools.
Failing to find it separately, I searched for an older version of VMware.
I’ve managed to find the VMware Workstation 4.5.2 package – which should be old enough to support such old guests – in .exe form.
I couldn’t extract the VMware Tools image directly from it though – so, failing that, I searched further and found a tar package of VMware 4.5.2.
Success, I found the VMware Tools image in there!
Hoping it’ll work, I proceeded to install it:
Code:
# mount /mnt/cdrom
# tar xzf /mnt/cdrom/<vmware tools archive>
# cd <vmware tools directory>
# ./<install file>.pl
-snip-
# startx
<fail>
#
Failing to get it to work, I did further research and found that VMware Tools’ video driver doesn’t work with XFree86 4.0.0.
Mandrake insisted on installing XFree86 4.0.0 everytime – so I gave up on trying to get it to work.
I tried giving RedHat 6.2 (not RHEL) a try – the install went through fine. However, I was stuck in that SCSI timeout loop. I figured out how to fix it though! I had to boot the “vmlinuz-up” kernel.
That worked fine – I proceeded to install VMware Tools and it went through flawlessly.
Succeeding with that, I tried getting it to work with Mandrake again.
I tried to remove the XFree86 4.0.0 package and ran ‘startx’ again. No luck.
Still failing to get the damned thing to work, I tried reinstalling VMware Tools to see if it would notice that XFree86 4.0.0 is no longer installed and use 3.3.6 instead.
It worked – the VMware Tools install script no longer referred to XFree86 4.0.0.
I ran ‘startx’, and – it worked without issues!
I was in so much joy. I felt like I’ve done the impossible!