somehow my whole screen just turned upide down.

never had that happen before.

very wierd.

any idea how to restore?

Rad.Test wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2008 at 5:43pm:

If you're talking about the green HDD activity icon in the lower-right corner of VMWare workstation being busy, that'll be work that the Ubuntu system was doing, such as analysing itself against the current Ubuntu package servers for what updates are necessary since it's been asleep for a few months.

VMware always emulates a wired Ethernet adapter instead of a wireless one because those are sane; you DO NOT want a VM knowing or caring about the insanity of wireless authentication and encryption. So, instead it emulates something that behaves uniformly without any of that nonsense, and thus allows the VM to be copied around and run on any physical hardware at all. OS's for which no wireless drivers are available can still run over wireless this way.

Indeed, the outer machine doesn't have to have a network connection at all. Instead, you can ask VMware to use an imaginary local Ethernet connecting all the running virtual machines in the host, so they can see each other (and the host machine).

This is important because you don't want the VMs writing to the same physical storage, since each OS does no co-ordination of work with anything else and assumes it's in total control. Although there are solutions for this (e.g. the clustering file system created for VAX/VMS and VMWare VMFS and other things for serious business use) where the OS instances coordinate, it's not something that any low-end consumer OS's have built in directly.

So, instead of mounting the outer host's disks directly from the VM, which mean the two would fight and pretty quickly trash the filesystem, you have to share them, either using the existing network support in both OS's (i.e., SMB file sharing) or using something like VMware's "Shared folders" feature which installs a special driver into the guest OS (called HGFS, for Host/Guest File System).

Rad, if you haven’t discovered them already, there exist very active (and helpful) VMware community forums (see http://communities.vmware.com/index.jspa).

Also, for an additional $40/year, you can add “Individual Workstation License Support and Subscription” to VMware Workstation – and, that gives you access to telephone support (see http://www.vmware.com/products/ws/buy.html#c6044) as well as product upgrades.

Finally, try using Norton Ghost to restore an image to a VM!  Hopefully, you find it fun.