Paul Annekov aka SteelRat

Recently, I have a problem with VirtualBox and my video capture card Pinnacle 500-USB. Ubuntu doesn’t support this capture card and VirtualBox has some problems with captured image after USB port mapping. It’s well-known problem of USB 2.0 VirtualBox support.

My friend @mavashi has advised me to use VMware product – VMware Player. There is no problems with USB 2.0 in it and it’s totally free. My capture card worked successfully after I created virtual machine, installed OS and some soft. I needed only to make the virtual machine startup just after Ubuntu launch. I have maked a target to launch player without GUI. Unlike VirtualBox, VMware Player have much less terminal commands. VirtualBox has terminal command “headless”, which solve my target very fast. VMware doesn’t have such command. I began to search my answer from “fake” X-server (Xvfb). It emulates a dumb framebuffer using virtual memory. But I couldn’t configure it (and this is good). Google helps me to find one more product – VMware VIX. This is API for to automate virtual machine operations.

Product install was simple like VMware Player install (download the package and run using gksudo). After install I have added one line to rc.local file:

vmrun –T player start /root/vmware/vm/vm.vmx nogui &

• T – application name, which will run virtual machine (in our context it’s “player”).
• start – player command (launch virtual machine using it’s link).
• nogui – disable GUI.

All work good after I adding this command and restarting the OS.

I hope that this article will be informative for you.

Tags: nogui, ubuntu, vmare player, vmware vix