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{ 2007 09 12 }

Open source VMware guest tools

I haven’t made a work related post in quite some time, but I’ve got a good reason now.

Yesterday, we announced that we’re open-sourcing most parts of our Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris guest tools. You can see the site with details of what’s present (including kernel modules) here.

I think this is genuinely a big deal - it opens the door to integrating the tools into distros so that a newly created vm starts up with all the tools in place and updates to them come through the standard distro mechanisms. I also hope we see them ported to other operating systems. If you wished your favourite boutique OS had full guest support, now it can.

Posted by Philip Langdale on Wednesday, September 12, 2007, at 17:29. Filed under The Joy of Work. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment or trackback from your blog.

{ 3 } Comments

  1. Joseph | 12th September 2007 at 18:31 | Permalink

    Congrats on releasing them! It’s good to know that the money I give to VMWare (and encourage others to give ;) is getting re-invested in the community.

    Are there any plans to ease VMWare workstation module distribution, so that e.g. Ubuntu can distribute the modules for easy end-user integration?

  2. Philip Langdale | 12th September 2007 at 23:36 | Permalink

    I can’t talk about future plans, but it’s also very much in our interest to make it easy to distribute updated modules to users.

  3. Anders | 13th September 2007 at 07:00 | Permalink

    Have a look at my update at the VMTN blog:
    http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2007/09/were-pro-open-s.html

    - Anders

{ 1 } Trackback

  1. vizzr.info » Blog Archive » VMware Open Source guest tools | 15th November 2007 at 08:05 | Permalink

    [...] Open source VMware guest tools [...]

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