Today I stuck with the VMware Player on my Ubuntu box. Because of the electricity cut off, my VMWare session got lost in the middle of working. When the electricity came back, VMware was not there. It started to give error that another instance is being used but there is none at that moment. There were two options; Take Ownership or Cancel. Once I picked taking the ownership of the current instance I got; "Taking ownership of this virtual machine failed. The virtual machine is in use by an application on your host computer. Configuration file: /home/mobilizer/vmware/OS12.vmx" After taking a look at directories I found the *.lck directories under ~/vmware/ directory. After doing a simple rm -r *.lck from ~/vmware/, my VMware Player started to work again.

Today, I would like to talk a little bit about my working environment nowadays. There is a fresh Ubuntu 8.10 installation on my old(but gold) Thinkpad. I have VMware Player on it which contains a copy of my company's Windows XP operating system. At first time, I had a feeling that it will be very slow to work from a VMware installation but it works really fast on my machine! If you want to make your VMware faster, you can goto your VMware image directory and change the "memsize" property of the corresponding *.vmx file according to your needs. For instance you can increase the amount of memory dedicated to VMware to 2Gb as; Open an editor from your console >gedit ~/vmware/yourWindows.vmx and change memsize property to memsize = "2048" . If you are like me and feel more comfortable when coding on a linux box, it worths a try. Happy coding...