Comments on: VMWare + iTunes + iPhone + Ubuntu Linux = awesome

By: Steve Laniel

Steve Laniel — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:48:30 +0000

Hi Kevin,

XP performance has been quite terrific. It's been a while since I've used the Player, but I do recall noticing a significant performance boost when I switched from Server to Workstation. My Ubuntu laptop has a gig of RAM; I've allocated 256 megs to the XP VMWare instance.

As for Cover Flow: I don't believe it's enabled, because the virtual video card doesn't support Direct3D. Such, at least, is what I gather from Apple and VMWare. I followed the directions in the second link, but it didn't work. I could probably get it to work if I poked around a bit more, but I don't have time just at the moment.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:32:00 +0000

I am wondering how your performance is with Windows XP as the guest OS. I have Kubuntu and am using VMWare Player. The performance is pretty bad. Music is choppy and videos are rough in iTunes. I may need to upgrade my system’s memory from 1 GB to 2 GB. Also, do you have coverflow working in your VMWare image?

By: zeddock

zeddock — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 06:52:27 +0000

Wish it would sync on VirtualBox.

zeddock@gmail.com

By: mrz

mrz — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:44:42 +0000

The shared folders in workstation are indeed nice, but if you want to be a cheapy, you could just export the MP3 directory via samba and access them from the XP image that way.

By: Adam Rosi-Kessel

Adam Rosi-Kessel — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:41:53 +0000

Right, VMWare Player. It was fine for my purposes. I’m not a serial virtualizer.

By: Steve Laniel

Steve Laniel — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:58:26 +0000

The free minimal version would be the VMWare Player, right?

Shared Folders are reason enough to use Workstation; otherwise you need to copy MP3s into the image.

I'd be curious also whether you see the performance boost that I saw when I switched to Workstation.

By: Adam Rosi-Kessel

Adam Rosi-Kessel — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:52:21 +0000

FWIW, I was similarly able to mount my iPod with Windows XP as the host and Ubuntu Linux as the guest OS running in VMWare. I was able to use the free minimal version of VMWare and it all worked fine.

By: Tony Bartling

Tony Bartling — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:47:05 +0000

VirtualBox from Sun also does shared filesystems for guest OSes. I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop for about 18 months now, and while I still have an XP partition, I haven't booted to it in the six months since I installed VB.

However, as far as recommendations go, VMWare WS and VB are basically equivalent, so there's no compelling reason to switch if you've got a working VMWare install.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:03:13 +0000

"Go to the VM menu, then Settings, then Options, then Shared Folders. Select “Always Enabled”, because why not."

Because if your Windows installation gets hacked or gets a nasty cough, cold, or other virus, it can wipe out the shared folder.

"I would select “Read-only”, but I don’t know whether iTunes needs to write into my MP3 directory."

iTunes does indeed need to write to you MP3 directory, if for no other reason than to apply ID3 tags (if you use them). If your MP3 directory is also your iTunes Music folder, iTunes will also need to store (i.e. write) preferences there.

I hope that info is useful. Otherwise, wish I had been the one to suggest VMWare. I use virtual OSes all the time and they are UNBELIEVABLY useful. Just wish I didn't HAVE to.