[X2go-User] Problem with X2Go and VMWare Tools

Daniel Lindgren bd.dali at gmail.com
Sat Feb 18 19:54:17 CET 2012


Hi.

I've been troubleshooting a weird problem with X2Go for a while, when
connecting to Gnome sessions in virtual machines the top and bottom
panels are displayed but the desktop/background never shows up and the
mouse pointer never stops spinning. It's like the Gnome session
startup reaches 99% and then just waits forever for something.

It turns out it's related to VMWare Tools. I use VMWare Hypervisor
(ESXi) 5, I can't say if the problem started when I upgraded from ESXi
4 to 5, but it's fairly recent.

I discovered that there are two instances of vmtoolsd running, the
process list looks something like this when the X2Go session reaches
"wait forever" state:

root at labblinux:~# ps auxw | grep vmware
dali     12906  1.4  1.4 174604 14588 ?        S    18:47   0:00
/usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmtoolsd -n vmusr
dali     12956  1.4  0.3 174604  3680 ?        S    18:47   0:00
/usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmtoolsd -n vmusr
root     12971  0.0  0.0   7556   860 pts/0    S+   18:47   0:00 grep vmware

If I "kill -1 12906" the other vmtoolsd (12956) dies(!):

root at labblinux:~# kill -1 12906
root at labblinux:~# ps auxw | grep vmware
dali     12906  0.4  1.4 174604 14616 ?        S    18:47   0:00
/usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmtoolsd -n vmusr
root     13041  0.0  0.0   7556   860 pts/0    S+   18:48   0:00 grep vmware

Simultaneously the X2Go/Gnome session startup successfully finishes.

Starting a Gnome session locally on the virtual machine console
successfully finishes. I've tried using xrdp instead of X2Go and had
no problems starting sessions, both using X11rdp and X11vnc on the
server side. There's only one vmtoolsd running unless it's a X2Go
session.

I've unsuccessfully tried to figure out what the root cause is. It
seems related to X2Go login/startup, somehow vmtoolsd starts twice and
there's a conflict blocking Gnome startup.

I did however find a workaround; uninstall VMWare Tools and install
the open-vm-tools package from the Debian repository (contrib has to
be added). No problems with X2Go so far and VMWare seems happy with
the open source tools (Shutdown/Restart Guest is available in vSphere
Client).

I posted this to both x2go-user and x2go-dev for informational
purposes. Maybe a wiki page would be the best place for this info? The
wiki is however in a sad state and needs some serious cleanup. I
personally don't think the template used is aesthetically pleasing and
would prefer the default template or Arctic template which I've used
extensively in all my DokuWiki installs.

Cheers,
Daniel



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