sharing files with VMWare

I Recently installed VMWare on my machine to use linux while I'm on windows. Although I have linux installed on my laptop's hard disk in a dual boot setup (which took me a painful 24 hours to setup everything, including wireless driver installation), I've become a user of VMWare lately. That's because I can switch to using linux much faster, and the network connection is more robust. I used to be a cygwin user, and now I've dumped it in favor of linux on WMVare!

Any way, the first and biggest problem I faced using fedora core 5 on a VMWare session was the problem of file sharing between windows and WMWare. WMWare (at least its free player version) doesn't read host system's directories. No NTFS access (which a native linux installed as dual boot can do), no shared directory, nothing. I'm not sure, but they may have reserved it for their non-free versions.

Naturally I googled to find a solution. The most practical suggestion I found was to use a USB memory stick, since the VMWare player recognises memory sticks. Not a very elegant solution I should say. It worked, but was a pain in the A..!

So here's a suggestion that works like a charm: Download and install a free FTP server software on your windows machine. I used the GNU software FileZilla. After installing it, add a user account, with a username and password. You also need to set at least one directory as the FTP directory. Don't forget to give the user you just created Write and delete permission in addition to the default read permit.

You also need to know your computer's IP address (use windows' ipconfig command). Now in the linux session running in your WMWare, open a file browser (in my fedora setup, I can use "computer" or "home folder" icons, which actually launch the nautilus shell manager. There is a similar app in KDE which I don't remember its name now), and enter your computer's IP address in the address bar, which should be something like this: ftp://192.168.0.xxx

If everything is setup correctly, a pop up dialog box should ask your user name and password. Enter them, and ... presto! You have your designated FTP directory in VMWare, with full read and write access. Enjoy!

Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.

If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!