If you’ve downloaded the most recent Novell Linux 9 installed VMWare image trial —what a mouthful—directly from Novell you may encounter some video display issues during the first boot. Essentially X Windows won’t start. Worse, at least on my machine, the display was nearly completely garbled to the point of hopelessness. To add insult to injury, you likely will be able to read that X Windows won’t start and that you’ll need the undocumented root password to make changes.

Once you realize that the password for the root account in the trial VM image is “novell”, you at least have a fighting chance. The full solution is here (even though it’s not clear that this solution would work, it does).

Here are the steps:

Log in as root and do the following:

init 3
sax2 -r
say 'ok' to the new sax configuration.
init 5

Once you start sax2, you’ll need to adjust the resolution of the display (unless you want to run at the default 640x480).

After getting X-Windows and Novell Linux 9 up and running, I updated to the latest versions of Mono and its dependencies using these commands, logged in as root:

rug sa http://go-mono.com/download
rug sub mono-1.1-official
rug sub gtk-sharp-official
rug in mono-complete gtk-sharp

Updating to the latest version the VMWare tools with this downloaded VM image didn’t work. There’s an older version already installed that functions well enough.

click to enlarge

One minor issue right away I noticed …

Given that this is commercial software, I’m surprised to encounter messages like “NOT IMPLEMENTED; System pointer message 0x7f00.” It seems harmless enough as the remote desktop connection I made seemed quite functional while I used it for a couple of minutes.

I understand the warning (although I don’t know why anyone would really care that the server limited the color depth), but the second happens every time I used RDP at any color depth (both with defaults and manually set).

(I’m amazed by how much the Terminal Server Client UI was completely stolen from the Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop application though!).