ChipLog

It’s official. We’ve released VMware Workstation 5.5. I could go on and on about how cool a release it is, but instead I’ll provide a short, non-comprehensive list of the changes:

• 64-bit guest support (on 64-bit hosts)
• Experimental support for Virtual SMP (make some use of that HT-enabled processor!)
• Much improved USB support.
• Improved support for bridging to a wireless networking device on Linux hosts.
• Auto-detect device support. Set your floppy, CD-ROM, etc. devices to auto-detect, and Workstation will make a best guess attempt at finding the device on the system. This allows VMs to be a bit more portable, as device paths and names no longer have to be hard-coded. For now, this is off by default for backward-compatibility reasons, but it’s easy to turn on on a per-device-basis.
• Far better support for auto-resizing Linux guests.
• Official Ubuntu Linux support.
• Improvements in vmware-config.pl. If your kernel version and your compiler version don’t match, the script will attempt to find a compiler that does work. For example, if your kernel is compiled with gcc 3.4 and /usr/bin/gcc points to gcc 4.0, but you have /usr/bin/gcc-3.4, vmware-config.pl will use the 3.4 version.
• The Snapshot Manager now allows for multiple snapshots to be selected at once. This is useful for deleting.
• First release to use libview, VMware’s Incredibly Exciting Widgets, our MIT-licensed GTKMM/GTK+ widgets. (Linux-only, of course)
• User interface cleanups on Linux. Specifically, we have improved the UI on many themes. The theme now renders the pages and headers on the pages. This dramatically improves the feel of the program on many themes.
• Includes VMware Player.
• Lots of bug fixes.

It’s a very nice release. If you’re a licensed user of Workstation 5.0, you have a free upgrade to 5.5. For all those lucky people who received a license at the Boston GNOME Summit, go nuts

As always, there are screenshots available. If you look closely, you’ll even spot a familiar nick.

Oh, and expect a libview 0.5.5 release within a couple of hours. This was unofficially released a couple of weeks ago, but was never actually put up. Woops Stay tuned.