First of all I should point out that I’m still alive, although I haven’t updated this blog for quite some time.

The main point of this entry is to highlight the fact that I’ve got a console for virtual machines running under linux, with VirtualCentre 2.0 (or virtualcenter for you americans).

The MUI (the web interface) has a console page for each of the virtual machines, but it requires a plugin. Under windows and IE, this is an ActiveX plugin. Under mozilla/firefox, there is a plugin provided called vmware-mks.xpi. It installs and runs fine under windows, but when trying to install it on Firefox 1.5.0.7 on my Ubuntu 6.06 install, it fails with a message along the lines of “Failed to install vmware-mks.xpi Because: cancelled.” Closing my browser, disabling plugins etc had no effect.

I ultimately got this working by downloading the xpi, changing the file extension to .zip, unzipping it, and moving the resulting files to /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins. I also put a copy in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins just in case.

And now it works! I get a functional console with Virtual Centre 2.0 under linux. It seems there is little need for a proper client, unless theres a lot of functionality that I’m missing (which I’m sure there probably is – VMotion comes to mind).

Thats all for now, time to go home 😉