vizz.info

If your Xubuntu 8.x/9.x (XFCE) VM keeps logging you out on startup it may be a problem with your XFCE config startup or VMware tools toolbox startup settings.

So just reboot your VM into single user mode or login as root (only if you’ve pre/re/enabled root account login) and goto the users directory that has the problem and :

# cd ~user-with-problem

# mv .config .old

# logout

Now you should be able to re-login as then problem user !

However they will have lost all their XFCE X11 X settings but you can now :

$ diff -qr .config .old

to investigate the XFCE or VMware setting that was causing the problem !

You can also check your .xsession-errors file(s) to see if you’re getting:

vmware-user: could not open /proc/fs/vmblock/dev

in which case you could try and re-run vmware-config-tools.pl and reboot to fix !

If you’ve built a VMware VM but forgotten to turn off LVM and therefore cant use vmware virtual toolbox to shrink your disks you can still perform a virtual shrink by filling up your vm vmdks with 0’s !

$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=40M count=40 of=1
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=40M count=40 of=2
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=40M count=40 of=3
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=40M count=40 of=4
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=40M count=40 of=5

etc etc

$ rm 1 2 3 4 5

This didnt affect the 11G of space used by my vm vmdk disks but it did reduce the tgz of the entire vm from 5.5G to 3.3G !