It took a while to get everything running and I pulled all the information I needed from many different sites. So pulled them all together in this blog entry:

1. Register at the VMware page. Download the package for VMware server as *.tar.gz. Extract the archive.
2. Current VMware products do not support the Linux kernel 2.6.32. Therefor you need a patch for the installation archive. Download the patch from the following link and extract it in the parent folder of you VMware download: VMware patch for Linux kernel 2.6.32. More information could found on this page and pages linked on this page.
3. Run the script with super-user rights. It is quite simple to install. Most of the times you could just hit enter for every question of the installer. At one point the installer ask for a system user which runs the Vmware instances. If you leave it at the default choice, root will be the user. Make sure you have password to log in as root user. (You can set a root password by running the following command on a terminal:
   

   sudo passwd root

4. If you are running a new Ubuntu system you might have get a Firefox version >= 3.6. In these versions the VMware console plugin for the browser won’t work, so download a older version of Firefox from this page (3.5.9 should be highest working version number).
   Extract it somewhere and run it:

   ./firefox -no-remote -P

   You might create a new Firefox profile (-P) and make sure a new instance of the Firefox is starting (-no-remote)

5. On a few guest operating systems you might have some trouble with some of the arrow keys of you keyboard. To get them working run this command from a terminal:
   

   sudo echo “xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true” >> /etc/vmware/config

   You need to run this on the computer where you want to start the VMware console. More Informations could be found here.

6. Browse to you VMware administration panel (http://localhost:8222 or https://localhost:8333). Create and start a virtual machine. Install the browser plug-in. Launch the console.

VMware admin & console

I make no secret of that I am a big fan of the Firefox web browser. Except of a few things that I will name later I am/was always impressed by the speed improvements that are made over the past few years, which seems very important to me, because many pages you use in you daily life are more and more based on heavy JavaScript functionalities. A few days ago I decided to give a try to the newest development version of the Firefox – named Minefield – and make some tests.

Building

Instead of using a nightly build I decided to to compile it by myself, which was not that hard. If you like to do it yourself could simply follow the instruction on that page: Simple Firefox build. I used slightly modified the mozconfig file in hope to get the best performance:

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-release
mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac add_options --disable-crashreporter

Testing

As performance test I used the Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark from the Webkit developers. To make it short, here are the result for 3 versions of Firefox:

a

time in milliseconds, faster is better

time in milliseconds, faster is better

Results

When I switched from from Firefox 3.0.x to the 3.5 branch of Firefox I was really amazed by the performance boost gained through the new JavaScript engine Tracemonkey. As the results above show the next Firefox releases will get another boost. Good news!

P.S.: Other things I like Firefox for is because of all the very useful add-ons, I hardly could imagine a day as a web-developer without the use of Firebug. AdBlock saves my nerves every day. Linkification, TinyURL generator and Greasemonkey are just a few other I really like and needed to be named here.