2009 Sep 29 - Tue

VMWare Unity

In the latest release of VMWare Workstation, it has a new feature called Unity Mode. It is useable with Linux and Windows 2000 and later guest operating systems. Unity Mode happens when clicking a button in VMWare to "display applications directly on the host desktop".

The help file goes on to say:

The virtual machine console view is hidden, and you can minimize the Workstation window.

You can use keyboard shortcuts to copy, cut, and paste text between applications on your host machine and virtual machine applications displayed in Unity mode. You can also drag and drop and copy and paste files between host and guest.

The Ctrl+Shift+V key combination will pop up the virtual machine's Start or Applications Menu.

[/Personal/Technology] permanent link

Upgrade to KDE4: Black Screen, Obsidian Cursor

Today when upgrading my Debian Lenny/KDE to the latest version, I started having problems with KDE.

On my first upgrade, I did a simple 'apt-get update', 'apt-get upgrade' sequence. A bunch of packages were held back. The end result was that I could log in to KDE, and could see a desktop, but I had no menu interface.

Considering that there were a bunch of packages being help back, I did a 'apt-get update', 'apt-get dist-upgrade' sequence. Upon logging into the KDE shell, all I saw was a black screen and a shiny obsidian cursor.

It looks like the transition from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.0 is not seamless in this Debian (Lenny) point release. However, that isn't quite correct. In my /etc/apt/sources.list file I do have entries for testing and experimental. So..., I may now be downloading testing or experimental releases.

In any case, the resolution to the problem appears to be to drop into the console and run one of these three commands: 'apt-get install kde-standard', 'apt-get install kde-minimal', or 'apt-get install kde-full'.

[/OpenSource/Debian] permanent link