VMs four: stuff works!

My boss apparently figured out the problem with the VMware clone: fakes3 (for faking a local Amazon S3 service) apparently behaves badly if given the local hostname (or just localhost?) rather than an IP address, and I'd probably edited the clones files to use a name because why wouldn't you.

And I tackled my VBox again, and got shared directories working! I'd found a different set of instructions, which worked for manual mount, and then even automount from fstab. Going back, I reproduced the error I'd gotten from the Arch instructions: I'd been using '/vmshare /vmshare' (Window and guest locations, a la VMware FUSE command syntax) when it actually wanted 'vmwshare /vmshare' (short name of the shared directory in VBox, guest location). "Protocol error" is a pretty terrible error message, but I can see now what I was doing wrong.

I also found VBox's Seamless Mode, which I don't quite see the deep point of yet, though it does reclaim screen space from the Windows title bar while still leaving the start/monitor bar at the bottom, but it's allegedly similar to VMware Unity Mode, except Unity says it doesn't support Linux Guests.

So VirtualBox seems strictly better than VMware in features, since it does everything one would want, while VMware doesn't do Unity or (more important to me) touchpad scrolling. OTOH we probably have the VMware clone at least behaving the way we expected it to. Though I'm not sure this was actually tested on it, I think it's a prognosis based on fixing something on the Ubuntu machine.

Also VBox is open source and doesn't charge you money for running more than one VM at once. OTOH we already paid VMware the money.

I haven't tried comparing performance.