Gonna be heading overseas for a while, so decided to spend a little time ensuring that it’ll be easy (not to mention cheap) for me to phone home.

Been playing with VMWare for a while before this, so decided on the Skype on Windows route. (Skype developers, if you’re ever reading this, for goodness sake, please get video on Skype Linux! You’re missing out on a huge user base otherwise)

A short review of VMWare Server 1.0.0 below

==Installation==
Installation was pretty simple.. a short ./vmware-install.pl in the directory that the downloaded tarball was uncompressed into, and you’re on your way! VMWare’ll ask you a few questions like if you wanna put the icons into /usr/share/vmware or not. Just answer the questions as you’d like your configuration to be set up.

VMWare will also ask you to set up your network for the virtual machines. Bridge and NAT are usually good options, if you want your VMs to function as separate machines on your network or hide behind your host OS respectively. I’m not sure of the the usefulness of Host-only networking though, that when your VMs can only communicate between themselves, behind your host, and not out onto the actual network. [Ok so maybe it's useful if you want to do try DOS'ing your VMs.. but...]

Anyway, running it gives you a nice management console from which to manage your VMs.

VMWare Server Console showing the settings for a Windows XP VM

==Using it==

I found it was very easy to create new VMs and modify its settings. You can easily modify stuff like whether the VM’s network used a your Host as a bridge or was NAT’ed behind it.

The advantage I found in using Server over the previous Player is that Server gives you more direct access to your hardware, in my case, my external IEEE1394 CD drive. USB devices work pretty fine too, only a little more troublesome than in Player, now having to navigate through a menu instead of just clicking the dropdown bar. [Apologies: I uninstalled Player before doing this write-up, so I don't have shots of Player to show ]

VMWare Server’s Devices Menu

Other than this little inconvenience each time I wanna use USB devices though, VMWare Server’s a pretty good thing to have around. Coupled with a good Windows VM, and you won’t have an excuse to reboot just to use that Redmond OS again

==About Skype==

I was initially excited about being able to use Skype to conduct video chats in Windows on VMWare.. but that joy was shortlived.. Somehow, Skype doesn’t seem to like my webcam very much.

As you can see:

Webcam works perfectly in Windows Explorer…

Windows itself does recognise the webcam, and can use it .

But..

… but not Skype

As far as I’ve tried though, Skype adamantly refuses to recognise the webcam.

Has anyone gotten webcams to work for video chat in Skype in Windows on VMWare before? Would appreciate it lots if you could drop me a link or something..

If I can’t get it working.. maybe I’ll have to switch to another program.. Ekiga maybe?