about:nothing

Quick reminder:

To allow a VMware guest to use a “real” MAC for one of its emulated network adaptors (specifically one outwith VMware’s own manufacturer range allocated for virtual machines) one need only add the following to its .vmx file:

ethernet0.checkMACAddress = "FALSE"
ethernet0.addressType = "static" 
ethernet0.address = "<new MAC>"

Interesting edit (22-Apr):

It appears that, although this prevents VMware restricting MACs to within its ‘manual’ range (00:50:56:[00-3F]:*), this is not sufficient to allow assignment of addresses within the VMware ‘automatic’ range (00:0C:29:*). VMware simply ignores any statically assigned MACs in this range, instead reverting to the generated MAC within that range (removing the ‘generatedAddress’ resource is not sufficient to override this). I’m still not sure if this is by accident or design.

Just because I use twm, doesn’t mean I don’t want user-space mounting. So I use gnome-mount without invoking the whole gnome desktop environment. It appears impenetrable from the shell (though its man page is somewhat more useful).

The key is in the ‘-t -v’ options, which enable verbose console output rather than the useless X dialogs.

A simple mounting example:

$ gnome-mount -tv -d /dev/sdb1 [-m mountlabel]


where /dev/sdb1 is your device to mount, and mountlabel will be a subdirectory of /media (often ‘disk’ by default).

gnome-umount works in the same way:

$ gnome-umount -tv -m mountlabel


There’s plenty more configuration to be had, but sometimes you just want to look at a disk.