Any tips on running Haiku on VMware Workstation Pro?

I just learned that VMWare Workstation Pro and VMWare Fusion Pro are now free for personal use.
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I am thinking this might be a good way of running Haiku on a spare Thinkpad with a smashed up screen + external display that boots Windows 10 fine, but will only boot Haiku to the smashed up laptop screen, and not to to the external display.

Anyone here running Haiku on VMWare Workstation Pro? Do you have any tips on how I can successfully install Haiku on it, especially in terms of getting maximum screen resolution from it? Thanks.


P.S. I found just the resource I needed on this very site! I am amazed!
Virtualizing Haiku in VMware Workstation | Haiku Project

Wonderful instructions! Haiku is now up and running on Windows 10 Pro, via VMWare Workstation Pro. Unfortunately, Haiku’s Screen preferences does not allow me to select 2K resolution (2560 x 1440) so I could not get a full screen experience, but Haiku certainly looks good on a big external display, compared to a small laptop one!

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Is there any difference in using this compared to the non-pro version? (running that for quite some time and it’s so far been good).
Gave the website a bit of a look, but I guess you need an account/register to get to the download.

You don’t tell what model but the best way to run Haiku on a ThinkPad is on bare metal!

What kind of port is the external display plugged into? I’ve mirrored Haiku successfully with ancient VGA ports and with HDMI. If this is some obscure kind of mini-DisplayPort it may be ticket-worthy.

Are you using vmware_addons?

I’ve got the display connected via both analog VGA-HDMI adapter and a digital DisplayPort-DisplayPort cable (both on the Ultrabase3) as a connection from the Thinkpad X230’s Mini DisplayPort to the monitor’s DisplayPort did not work for me although I must say I didn’t perhaps work through all the options methodically due to the need to get into BIOS to set the display port to activate at boot time.

The advantage of booting Haiku in a VMWare hypervisor on Windows 10 to my mind is the ability to set up Windows 10 to use just the external display at the external display’s resolution (in my case 2K) rather than mirroring the 1366x768 resolution of the X230 which looks very blurry on a big screen.

I also have a fully functioning Thinkpad X230 with Core i7 CPU on which I have a bare metal Haiku installation on a SSD in the Ultrabase3, so I can feel the difference in responsiveness between that and the Haiku on VMWare. Especially since the Thinkpad X230 with the broken screen has only 4GB RAM and a physical HDD which seems to be a poor match with virtualizing anything.

Sadly though I was not able to get a bare metal Haiku to run on this X230 with the 2K external display although I had previously had success connecting a FHD display via analog VGA.

One good thing about running Haiku on Win 10 via VMWare is that I can run stuff not available on Haiku such as Zoom and Teams on the Windows side.

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Yes!:+1: The first thing that I installed from HaikuDepot after it booted in VMWare!

I’m not entirely sure of the differences, but it seems that maybe Pro is the more full featured big brother of Player? One big difference seems to be the ability of Pro to run multiple VMs simultaneously subject to your PC having enough RAM and processing power I suppose. This might come in useful in my case for when I might want to run Haiku concurrently with FerenOS or GhostBSD in order to use their browsers after Win 10 reaches end-of-life in fall 2025…

One thing about my Haiku install on the VMWare Workstation Pro running on Windows 10 Pro on Thinkpad X230 install is that I am currently not getting any sound from the apps on Haiku, although the Win 10 Pro itself is working fine with sound.

For example, when I try to launch SoundRecorder on Haiku, an error message pops up to the effect "Default audio hardware cannot be found: Name not found. [80000007] ". I’ve tried some suggestions off the net like installing an alternate sound driver from the Lenovo support site, and fiddling in the VM configuration panel of VMWare and toggling the connected sound card from the default soundcard option to a specific one such as the Realtek High Definition (Speaker/Headphone) but to no avail.

Anyone on the forum with some experience of any similar issue and its solution please?

I can’t say much about your model, I own a T480s and the two might be different, but if you boot with the lid closed the video should go through the external port including the boot config screen. Maybe, the docking station gets in the way somehow.

That’s what I’m guessing. I’ve found that when I connect a smaller1920 x 1080 display via VGA analog output, I can get the X230 to boot off a Haiku USB stick but with the larger 2560 x 1440 (2K) display, the Haiku USB stick will show a boot sequence up to the Rocket-Take-Off icon, but the display then loses sight of the PC’s video output signal on both the analog VGA-HDMI connection and the digital DisplayPort connection.

With your T480s, do you connect via VGA or Displayport?

As someone who also is running Haiku in VMware Workstation Pro, here are a few things I discovered:

  • Make sure to open up the VMware applet (after installing the vmware_addons package) at least once by going into the Deskbar → Desktop Applets → VMware add-ons. This provides a Deskbar applet for controlling for mouse sharing, clipboard sharing, and shrinking virtual disks.
  • If you are running hrev58204 or newer, you can use the VMware network driver by going to the folder containing your virtual machine, opening up the .vmx file with a text editor, and add/change the line “ethernet0.virtualDev” to ethernet0.virtualDev = “vmxnet3”.
  • As for sound problems, within the .vmx file, try adding the line: sound.virtualDev = “hdaudio”
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HDMI and (two) USB-C ports, both work well.

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