Vmware instructions and cheat sheet.

Vmware make a series of products that allow you to run virtual machines on your real machine. A virtual machine is a machine that is run in software and can run at the same time as the real machine.
This machine has virtual hardware including possibly a soundcard, floppy drives, hard drives, usb ports and network adapters.


To use these machines you will need to install 7zip, available on the CAVI site.  
7-zip can also be downloaded from http://www.7-zip.org/
It runs gracefully alongside your preferred archive programs such as winzip or WinRar if these are your preferred applications.  If you want 7zip as your preferred application, this is also possible. 
The easiest way to use 7zip is with the context menu in explorer. Go to the folder where you have put the machines, and right click on the 7zip file. go down to the 7zip option which has a sub menu. From the submenu choose extract Here. 
Each archive will create a folder that contains the virtual machine.
Note that you will need to download all parts of the 7-zip archive before extracting it. Archives have been split into 100,000,000 byte chunks to facilitate easier downloading of the machines.

The folder that is created will contain a vmx file that contains the settings for the machine, and also vmdk files that contains the hard disk image for the virtual machine.


You can use either vmware player or Vmware Server to run these machines.
Vmware Server will allow you to customize these machines to your requirements whereas the player will load and run the machines but allows limited enabling and disabling of devices in the virtual machine.
A discussion of vmware server is beyond the scope of this document however it is free and can be installed on both Windows and Linux.
The host machine is the machine running the vmware product. 
The guest machine is the operating system running inside the virtual machine.

Running virtual machines is relatively resource intensive.
For the minimum system requirements check the vmware website at www.vmware.com however following are our recommendations:
Your machine should at least have the following:
256-megs of ram for the operating system running on the machine hosting the vmware product.
Whatever memory the guest operating system needs to run.
For example to run a Windows xp machine inside a windows xp machine you will need a minimum of 256-megs of ram for the host operating system plus 256 megs of ram for the guest operating system so 512-meg in total.
This is the bare minimum required to run the virtual machines, you should have 640 megs or more memory. The more memory the better.
The machines that we generated the virtual machines on have 1gb of memory.
You will need a processer that is at least 1ghz or faster; the faster the better.
Our machines have Intel core duo processers at 1.66ghz or faster however a 1200mhz processer is sufficient to run the virtual machines. The faster the host machine the faster the virtual machines will run. This is especially true for the Windows virtual machines.

A soundcard will be required if you wish to hear speech inside the virtual machine, and it is listed as a requirement to run Windows XP.
A network interface card is highly desirable; although limited testing can be done with host only networking.

To open a virtual machine with vmware player do the following:
Launch vmware player.
Browse to where the unzipped virtual machine is located and find the .vmx file for the machine.
Click open.
This will load and run the virtual machine. You may be given a number of dialog boxes to ok before the machine boots, possibly explaining that certain hardware is not available to the virtual machine such as a serial port if running on a laptop with no serial ports.
You may also be informed that the machine has been moved, and asked whether or not to create a new identifier. It is usually best to create a new identifier uness you have a specific reason to keep the mac address and identifier the same on the virtual machine.

The machine will boot including the display of bios and the ram test etc. The Virtual Machine will also beep as a normal pc would.
By default your keyboard and mouse input are not directed at the virtual machine, you must "grab" input by pressing control-g when you are in the vmware player window.
To ungrab press control-alt (or whichever shortcut key you have assigned if running vmware server).
You might find that your control or alt key locks down, simply press the keys a few times alone or in combination until they unlock.

Note that once the virtual machine has input, jaws on the host machine will stop talking. This is because the virtual machine now has focus and unless you have accessibility software loaded in the virtual machine it will not speak, exactly the same as a real machine wouldn't speak.

A virtual machine behaves as a normal machine would except for a couple of minor points such as timing and the like. The virtual machine contains a bios, (inaccessible see above) and when powered on boots as a normal machine would.

Vmware player has limited configuration ability, you can enable and disable various hardware in the virtual machine, you can also power off or reset the virtual machine. To access these functions use your jaws cursor to click on the 2 scrolldown symbols to access both the troubleshooting menu and the hardware configuration.

Vmware server allows you to change machine configuration including adding and removing hardware, to do the same in vmware player you need to edit the .vmx file for the machine with notepad. this is not recommended for inexperienced users.

Please ensure whenever possible to power down the virtual machine if possible. Failure to do this may leave your virtual disks in an inconsistant state.

Summary of machines:
base sarge stable 20070321 is a Debian Linux 3.1 'Sarge' virtual machine. 
root username is root
password is debian all lower case
user account is noddy
password is user

This is a basic Linux machine with a 2.4.27 kernel and basic utilities.
You can install extra utilities with apt-get to customize the machine to your needs.


windows 2000 professional.7z is a windows 2000 machine with jaws 8.0 installed, running in forty minute demo mode.
Vmware tools have been installed in the virtual image and the machine contains a base install of Windows 2000 Professional.
administrator password is password and no other user accounts exist on the machine in its default configuration.

Windows XP Professional is a 6-gig image of a standard install of XP professional. It contains vmware tools and a copy of jaws for Windows running in demo mode.
username is user password is user


vmware networking basics:
An overview of how vmware handles networking can be found in the help for vmware server, or in the technical notes on the vmware website. A summary will be given to give you a quick start.
By default these virtual machines are configured to use natted networking. This means they share the ip address of the host machine and can access the internet via the host's network connection.
If running vmware server you can configure the networking characteristics for vmware server.
By default nat networking is configured on vnet8. This virtual interface has a randomly chosen ip subnet which is chosen at install time.
Thesaddressesses are usually chosen from a class C range on the 192.168 network. For example 192.168.191.1 and 192.168.191.254.

Vmware runs a small dhcp server that is only accessible to the virtual machines running on the host pc.
If your guest operating system is told to obtain an ip address automatically or assign an ip address automatically it will obtain and address through dhcp.
It can be difficult for a vision impaired person to find out what ip address has been assigned to a machine if it does not have access software installed into the virtual image.
In these cases you can do the following:

if running vmware server, look in the following directory:
c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\vmware\
and open the file vmnetdhcp.leases in a text editor.
this file contains all leases currently handed out by the internal dhcp server.
You should be able to ping the ip addresses listed here to determine where the virtual machine is located.