Last updated 2 June 2010 1:31PM
Vmware make a series of products that allow you to run virtual machines on your real machine. A virtual machine is a machine that is run in software and can run at the same time as the real machine. This machine has virtual hardware including possibly a soundcard, floppy drives, hard drives, usb ports and network adapters.
To use these machines you will need to install 7zip, available on the CAVI site.
7-zip can also be downloaded from http://www.7-zip.org.
It runs gracefully alongside your preferred archive programs such as winzip or WinRar if these are your preferred applications. If you want 7zip as your preferred application, this is also possible.
The easiest way to use 7zip is with the context menu in explorer. Go to the folder where you have put the machines, and right click on the 7zip file. go down to the 7zip option which has a sub menu. From the submenu choose extract Here.
Most archives are in multi-volume format which means the large archive has been split into smaller sections to facilitate easier downloading. In this case select the .001 file and start the extract on that file. If you have all parts of a multi-volume archive set in the same directory then 7-zip will automatically extract files from all parts.
Each archive will create a folder that contains the virtual machine.
Note that you will need to download all parts of the 7-zip archive before extracting it. Archives have been split into 100,000,000 byte chunks to facilitate easier downloading of the machines.
The folder that is created will contain a vmx file that contains the settings for the machine, and also vmdk files that contains the hard disk image for the virtual machine.
The host machine is the machine running the vmware product.
The guest machine is the operating system running inside the virtual machine.
Running virtual machines is relatively resource intensive.
For the minimum system requirements check the vmware website at www.vmware.com however following are our recommendations:
Your machine should at least have the following:
256-megs of ram for the operating system running on the machine hosting the vmware product.
Whatever memory the guest operating system needs to run.
For example to run a Windows xp machine inside a windows xp machine you will need a minimum of 256-megs of ram for the host operating system plus 256 megs of ram for the guest operating system so 512-meg in total.
This is the bare minimum required to run the virtual machines, you should have 640 megs or more memory. The more memory the better.
The machines that we generated the virtual machines on have 1gb of memory.
You will need a processer that is at least 1ghz or faster; the faster the better.
Our machines have Intel core duo processers at 1.66ghz or faster however a 1200mhz processer is sufficient to run the virtual machines. The faster the host machine the faster the virtual machines will run. This is especially true for the Windows virtual machines.
A soundcard will be required if you wish to hear speech inside the virtual machine, and it is listed as a requirement to run Windows XP.
A soundcard will not be needed when accessing Linux virtual machines.
A network interface card is highly desirable; although limited testing can be done with host only networking.
To open a virtual machine with vmware player do the following:
Launch vmware player.
Browse to where the unzipped virtual machine is located and find the .vmx file for the machine.
Click open.
This will load and run the virtual machine. You may be given a number of dialog boxes to ok before the machine boots, possibly explaining that certain hardware is not available to the virtual machine such as a serial port if running on a laptop with no serial ports.
You may also be informed that the machine has been moved, and asked whether or not to create a new identifier. It is usually best to create a new identifier uness you have a specific reason to keep the mac address and identifier the same on the virtual machine.
The machine will boot including the display of bios and the ram test etc. The Virtual Machine will also beep as a normal pc would.
By default your keyboard and mouse input are not directed at the virtual machine, you must "grab" input by pressing
control-gwhen you are in the vmware player window.
control-alt(or whichever shortcut key you have assigned if running vmware server). You can change this key through Edit->Preferences or
control-pin the hot key tab.
Jaws scripts have been provided that will stop the keys from becoming stuck; they are available on the cavi-discuss list or off the CAVI website in the vms folder.
The scripts are known to work with Vmware workstation, no idea if they will work with vmplayer or Vmware Server. It should be possible to rename the scripts to get them to work with other Vmware products.
Note that once the virtual machine has input, jaws on the host machine will stop talking. This is because the virtual machine now has focus and unless you have accessibility software loaded in the virtual machine it will not speak, exactly the same as a real machine wouldn't speak.
A virtual machine behaves as a normal machine would except for a couple of minor points such as timing and the like. The virtual machine contains a bios, (inaccessible to screen readers, see above) and when powered on boots as a normal machine would.
Inside a virtual machine there is a slight change in how the keyboard operates. Because control-alt-delete is trapped by the host operating system, you need to press control-alt-insert inside a virtual machine to send a control-alt-delete keystroek to the virtual machine.
Alternatively you can ungrab from the virtual machine and click "send control-alt-delete" from the menus in vmware server.
You can use either vmware player or Vmware Server to run these machines.
Vmware Server will allow you to customize these machines to your requirements whereas the player will load and run the machines but allows limited enabling and disabling of devices in the virtual machine.
A discussion of vmware server is beyond the scope of this document however it is free and can be installed on both Windows and Linux.
Vmware player has limited configuration ability, you can enable and disable various hardware in the virtual machine, you can also power off or reset the virtual machine. To access these functions use your jaws cursor to click on the 2 scrolldown symbols to access both the troubleshooting menu and the hardware configuration.
Vmware server allows you to change machine configuration including adding and removing hardware, to do the same in vmware player you need to edit the .vmx file for the machine with notepad. this is not recommended for inexperienced users.
Please ensure whenever possible to power down the virtual machine if possible. Failure to do this may leave your virtual disks in an inconsistant state.
rootroot password is
debianuser account is
noddypassword is
user
This is a basic Linux machine with a 2.4.27 kernel and basic utilities.
You can install extra utilities with apt-get to customize the machine to your needs. It is not recommended that you use this machine, as it is an old distribution of Debian, and it is not garunteed that you will get packages from the archives for it.
This is a 3gb virtual machine containing the latest Debian stable release 'Etch'.
root username is
rootroot password is
debianuser account is
noddypassword is
user
this machine also has a package installed called dwww; this will allow you to read documentation that is stored on the Linux machine in a web browser. Once the machine is powered on and booted, you can access documentation by pointing a browser at
http://w.x.y.z/dwww
Where w.x.y.z is the ip address of the virtual box.
Eth1 is a secondary network card to be used in ifconfig labs since if you change the ip address on the primary network card over a telnet session you will lock yourself out of the machine.
This is a 2gb Ubuntu 7.10 'Gutsy Gibbon' i386 server machine.
root username is
rootpassword is
passwordNote: You can log in with Tera Term as root
Ubuntu is a Debian derivitive that is more up-to-date and has commercial support available from Cononical.
This is an 8gb Fedora Core 7 machine. root username is
rootpassword is
passwordNote: You can log in with Tera Term as root
Fedora is a derivitive of Red Hat. Students may find doing ITE 2 labs easier with this machine, as the command syntax is closer to that of the labs. Note however that there are differences between the commands used in Red Hat 7.2 and Fedora Core 7.
windows 2000 professional. is a windows 2000 machine with jaws 8.0 installed, running in forty minute demo mode.
Vmware tools have been installed in the virtual image and the machine contains a base install of Windows 2000 Professional.
administrator password is
passwordand the other user is
cavi1with no password.
In Control Panel -> User Accounts. The "require username and password" checkbox has been checked. Upon booting a username and password dialog is displayed with Administrator pre filled as the username.
AVG Free antivirus definitions are up to date as of 21 October 2007.
The error encountered when trying to create new user accounts has been fixed. See cavi-discuss archives for discussion about this issue.
Windows XP Professional is a 10-gig image of a standard install of XP professional. The machine also has a secondary hard disk however disk space is only allocated when it is required. It contains vmware tools and a copy of NVDA 2010.1. Students who require another screen reader can install one onto this image as needed however CAVI does not provide screen reading software for this purpose.
username is
administratorpassword is
user
An overview of how vmware handles networking can be found in the help for vmware server, or in the technical notes on the vmware website. A summary will be given to give you a quick start.
By default these virtual machines are configured to use natted networking. This means they share the ip address of the host machine and can access the internet via the host's network connection.
If running vmware server you can configure the networking characteristics.
By default NAT networking is configured on vnet8. This virtual interface has a randomly chosen ip subnet which is chosen at install time.
These addressesses are usually chosen from a class C range on the 192.168 network. For example 192.168.191.1 and 192.168.191.254.
Vmware runs a small dhcp server that is only accessible to the virtual machines running on the host pc.
If your guest operating system is told to obtain an ip address automatically or assign an ip address automatically it will obtain and address through this dhcp server.
It can be difficult for a vision impaired person to find out what ip address has been assigned to a machine if it does not have access software installed into the virtual image.
In these cases you can do the following:
Look in the following directory:
c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\vmware\and open the file vmnetdhcp.leases in a text editor.
Once you have located the ip address that the virtual machine is listening on; you should be able to open a telnet or ssh session to the machine if it is running Linux.
To do this consult the quickstart Teraterm document.
Created on ... July 25, 2007