Old Li2-Crystals

Welcome back!

I'm sitting here with an XP machine and just as anyone who has read my stuff before would figure, I'm very interested in checking out Linux with the idea of eventually migrating most, if not all, of my computing activities to the free OS.

I've found that since I can't just reformat and switch or move to a dual boot, using a virtual machine is the logical answer. It gives me the opportunity to take various flavors of Linux for a test drive without having to alter my XP system before I'm sure that I am ready in every way.

The problem is that thus far the VM that I've tried is VMWare Player, which can only 'play' a VM instead of creating one or managing a network of them. No, VMware Player seems to be mostly a software version of promotional products in that it's designed to give you some functionality with the idea that you'll fork over the cash for the full VMWare Workstation. Nope, Not gonna do it. Free software is the only route I'm prepared to go.

So here I am with a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.04 on the nice shiny vmware player and it can do just about everything that Ubuntu can do on a physical machine... except connect to to my router and the net. It recognizes my ethernet card just fine but start up a browser and connection timeouts are all you'll see.

I've played around with the vmnetcfg.exe to try to get it to talk to the router but about the only thing I've been able to do is insure that it never will. And before you say it, Yes, I've been using search engines to find answers. I haven't found one yet and I'll keep looking. I would still however welcome any clues (or outright solutions, in fact that would be just dandy by me.)

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