i’m running vmware on my laptop. the laptop has two network interfaces: an ethernet port and a wireless card. i don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that it had two NICs until now, but whatever.

i have installed two VMs on this laptop. one is actually a boot camp partition that is running windows 7. i love the fact that vmware will boot up a boot camp partition and reuse hard drive space to run a VM. this saves me tons of valuable hard drive space on this laptop. i installed a windows partition on this laptop because it also happens to be my primary gaming machine and i needed to make sure that i could natively run games. i don’t play games often, but i like having the option of being able to do so. additionally, there are a handful of apps that only run on windows that i really want access to. there’s just no other way around it, unfortunately.

the second VM i have installed is a very small fedora installation. i’ve been pretty torn about installing a linux partition on this machine. mac os x (and i pronounce this mac oh-ess-ex, even though i know it is mac os 10, but i can’t help it) is unix system with a wonderful GUI. i’ve gone as far as to install XCode and use many packages from macports and fink. i feel like i can pretty much do anything i want on my mac machine as i can on any linux box, but…

our work servers run on linux and there’s just something to be said about being able to run the exact same binaries as your dev/test/production boxes.

anyway, i had put on a base install of fedora and i could not get networking to work. my network configuration for the windows VM and the linux VM were the same. it turns out that when the linux VM was installed, the virtual networking device created used the host’s ethernet interface and not the wireless, whereas the windows VM used the wireless interface.

to get networking working again, all i had to do was add a second interface and all is well with the world again. i have 1GB of yum updates downloading and once that is done, i can start setting up this linux box.