Zoetrope

After upgrading to Parallels Desktop 4 my CentOS 5 VM couldn't correctly launch its X server anymore. Installing Parallels Tools should fix that and will also enable the Dynamic Resolution switching. This enables you to just drag the righthand corner of your VM in windowed mode and X will automatically switch to the appropriate resolution.

The installer tries to download and install make, gcc and kernel-devel, and failed miserably and even when I installed the packages manually it wouldn't continue. It seems it checks the version number of the kernel you're running. Just yum update to kernel-2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 and run the installer again.

Here's how (from Parallel Desktop User Guide)

To unmount the image, enter:

umount /dev/hdb

Create a folder named Parallels Tools in the /media/ folder (this folder will serve as a mount point).

mkdir /media/Parallels\ Tools

To mount the image, enter:

mount -o exec /dev/hdb /media/Parallels\ Tools

Change the directory to the CD/DVD-ROM directory using

cd /media/Parallels\ Tools/

In the CD/DVD-ROM directory, enter the following to launch Parallels Tools installation:

./install

Dag Wieers' Dstat is the ultimate live monitoring tool to catch your servers in the act.

My favourite Dstat command:

dstat -l -c -p -y -m -p -d -n

Which will paint this pretty picture on a wide-enough terminal:

Note the periodical repeating header at the bottom! Dstat is even smart enough to truncate the columns if your terminal can't handle the heat because it's to narrow - marvelous...

Booting RHEL 5 or Centos 5 for the first time in Parallels Desktop (build 3188) wil get you an instant kernel panic. Just include agp=off as a kernel parameter and the system boots and works like a charm (use 'a' at the Grub screen to edit the kernel parameters).

Afterwards you can edit the /etc/grub.conf to include agp=off by default:

 
title CentOS (2.6.18-8.el5)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.el5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet agp=off
        initrd /initrd-2.6.18-8.el5.img