On Friday at work, I wrote a short post extolling the virtues of VMWare. It was freakin awesome. I had to debug a problem a user was having on a 3-year-old version of an obscure Linux distro, so Eliot (my boss) suggested using VMWare. It was so cool. I found a site that actually still had the distro available, downloaded it, installed it on a virtual machine, and got the exact same error the user was getting! Awesome.
Then I went home, figuring I’d work on it more when I got there.
When I got home… my wireless internet didn’t work. The kernel module for it wouldn’t even load, and when I ran ifconfig, it printed two new interfaces: vmnet1 and vmnet2. It turns out VMWare does something to some types of kernel modules. Damn you, VMWare!
For some reason, I’ve always had computers with Atheros wireless cards, which are very touchy about things like working. So, I started trying to get it going again. This pretty much describes how it went: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/success.png. Around 11pm, I gave up, and decided to leave it until Sunday, when I could look at it with fresh eyes.
Today, I booted into Linux to give it another shot. Or, rather, I attempted to boot into Linux. But, I had somehow messed up the modules in a way that made my system unbootable.
So, now I’m reinstalling Ubuntu.
Here’s hoping I make it to shore before the sharks get me. I’m going to be running VMWare from the OS X side of things from now on.
Kristina Chodorow's Blog 
