Put the vmware-remotemks' program where vmware console wants it

Symlink vmware-remotemks to /lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-remotemks

Mount linprocfs to /proc

mount -t linprocfs - /proc

Hack fix for vmware dep library

From vmware-server-console-distrib/lib/bin/:
for i in ../lib/lib*/*; do ln -s $i `basename $i`; done

Copy the pixmaps

sudo cp -R share/ /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/share

Remote console works for consoling into freebsd guests, but for some reason it doesn't display console for my solaris guest. Though, I can take screenshots and those look fine. Weird.

Now that I have all the hardware/bios problems fixed on this system, I've started installing vitrual machines. However, getting vmware to go was no small task.

• The install script failed to build the vmmon kernel module, so I hacked the script to not do it.
• Ubuntu has packages for vmmon and vmnet, but installs them in /lib/modules/.../vmware-server/ instead of /lib/modules/.../misc/ where the vmware init.d script expects them. Hacked that with a symlink. The init script looks for 'foo.o' and the ubuntu package provides 'foo.ko'.
• I couldn't verify my license key because vmware-vmx would fail to run with an error of "No such file or directory". Turns out this really means "You are running a 32 bit binary and I can't find the libraries it needs". The solution is to apt-get install ia32-libs and possibly others.

There are probably other hacks I had to do, but it's 5am and I don't remember them right now.

So my new fancy computer is here. Turns out I originally bought the wrong formfactor motherboard, because I had a silly moment.

Either way, I've now got the system running, but not without some serious battle scars.

Ubuntu happily installed (very slow to partition/newfs stuff though). However, upon reboot, the bios clearly couldn't see the boot drive. My SATA drives are plugged into the on-board Silicon Image RAID controller with no raid configurations set up.

Guessing, I told the raid controller to create a 1-disk concatonation with the disk I wanted to boot from. Voila, the BIOS sees the one disk now and I can boot from it. Linux finds the other two SATA drives when booting.

Sigh..

Also, when Ubuntu says "Computing the new partitions" it really means "I'm creating a new partition right now. Go get something to eat, I'm going to be here for a while." Large partitions, for some reason, take quite some time to create.

So a short while ago I published the tabsearch firefox extension. I thought to myself, "Why not put it up on addons.mozilla.org?"

To publish, you need to submit it to the addons review system. Submitting it puts it in the "sandbox". To leave the sandbox and go public it must be nominated. To pass nomination it must meet a large set of criteria, all of which make some amount of sense with respect to quality assurance, etc.

I've submitted it 3 times. Every time it's been denied for different reasons. The first time was half reasonable, because one of the reasons was "Remove those debugging statmenets". Other reasons have been:

"Document your preferences"

tabsearch doesn't have any options, preferences, or tweakables

"Your extension must have atleast one review from one of your users"

Do I have a QA team who can review this for me? I thought the reason I was publishing it on mozilla addons was to get users. Seems like an awkward bootstrapping problem I'm not going to bother solving.

"Make the key binding configurable"

That's what keyconfig is for :(

While I entirely agree that quality assurance through a review process is a great and useful idea, I think the firefox addons policies and reviewership group have taken it a bit far. There are only so many revisions I'm willing to do for the sake of publishing somewhere else. So, until I can find more time to throw at getting published at mozilla addons, you can expect to only find tabsearch here.

Benjamin Franklin wrote a blurb about perfection, '"Yes," said the man, "but I think I like a speckled axe best."'. Most of the time, perfection isn't worth the effort when something is already good enough.

I don't mean to discourage people from submitting to mozilla addons, but after 3 attempts it's really not worth it. Basically, the fine, nearly-unwritten print in the policy is that you need real people to have submitted very detailed reviews of your extension before it'll be approved.