As I have installed and administrated a bunch of Linux servers as virtual machines, I have had trouble keeping the time correctly. There is always a small drifting going on in virtual machines and a number of different ways to keep them synchronized with the host operating system.
Nowadays I have left that struggle behind letting the virtual guests keep themselves and their clocks correctly set.
On September 23 VMware released a new version of the free edition of their virtualization product VMware Server, version 2.0 (build 116503).
I have used the old versions of VMware Server a lot when running web sites, developing and testing software and techniques so I was very keen on trying the installation of this new release. Since I run this site on a virtual Ubuntu Server, using Ubuntu Server as host, I wanted to install the new VMware Server on a freshly installed Ubuntu Server 8.04.
To install the old versions of VMware Server correctly a lot of extra packages were needed on the host machine, such as x-window-system-core and xspecs. I’m not sure what all these extra packages do, but I didn’t like the fact that they had names like x-this and x-that. The machine running VMware Server has the server edition of Ubuntu installed for the simple reason that it is a pretty old thing and therefore it felt good not to install any X Window system.