VMware Image for Xenomai 2.4.3 on debian 4.0 linux

Getting started with the image

At http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ you can download a free VMware player
VMware Player lets you evaluate new or pre-release software contained in virtual machines, without any installation or configuration hassles. You can also share existing virtual machines with colleagues or friends. Just use VMware Player to run any virtual machine.
VMware Player is available for Linux and Windows, For Macintosh you can use the image for VirtualBox instead.
At http://www.cs.ru.nl/lab/downloads/debian4.0_xenomai2.4.3.7z you can download a vmware image which contains a minimal debian 4.0 linux installation with the Xenomai 2.4.3 realtime system patches installed. Unzip the files with 7-Zip and double click the .vmx file to run it. Note: after unpacking the image is 800 MB in size, and to run it in vmware you need another 256MB for the RAM memory file.
you can log in with the following credentials:
```
 user :           root
 passwd:          <empty password>
```
The root user has an empty password which comes down to just pressing enter when asked for it.
The image has also network support using 'NAT'. This means that the virtual machines can talk to each other and the outside network. However only machines in the local network, and not from the outside network can talk to the virtual machine.
A virtual machine with NAT enabled acts much like a real computer that connects to the Inter- net through a router. The “router”, in this case, is the VirtualBox networking engine, which maps traffic from and to the virtual machine transparently. The disadvantage of NAT mode is that, much like a private network behind a router, the virtual machine is invisible and unreachable from the outside internet; you cannot run a server this way unless you set up port forwarding.

Remote access

to find out the ip address of the os running in vmware type :
```
/sbin/ifconfig
```
the next two services will be started :
1. ssh server : ssh root@<ip-address>
  With this server you can log in to a remote shell on the os running in vmware. In this shell you can edit files with text editors like joe/nano/vim.
2. samba server :
  This server exports the root file system as networkshare for windows.
  On linux and macintosh computers you can access this share by going to the network location :
```
        smb://<ip-address>/root
        user: root
        passwd :<empty password>
```
  On windows you can access this share by typing the following in the explorer's address bar :
```
        \\<ip-address>\root
        user: root
        passwd :<empty password>
```

Fix time and date

You can ask the time and date of the virtual machine with the following command :
```
        date 
```

When you pause the virtual machine it can happen that, when the machine is resumed much later, the date and time settings are totally wrong. Luckily there is a quick fix. You can synchronize the time easily with a server on the university with the following command :

        rdate -s time-srv.science.ru.nl
                
                  or
        
        ntpdate ntp1.science.ru.nl
 
note: for ntpdate to work you first have to do the following 

        apt-get update
        apt-get install ntpdate
        tzconfig  # set timezone to Europe\Amsterdam  instead of America\NewYork

Multiple consoles

set vmware escape key in the preferences from ctrl-alt to ctrl-alt-shift
To do this in vmware player you have to open the file :

%AppData%\VMware\preferences.ini

Then add the following line :
```
   pref.hotkey.shift = "true" 
```
Note: the interface still says that you have to use ctrl-alt, so don't forget to use ctrl-alt-shift instead.
However in the newest vmplayer this is fixed!!
restart vmware
now you can use ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-alt-F2, ..., ctrl-alt-F6 to switch between different consoles