Change VMware virtual machine’s MAC address

When I try out evaluation software, such as ARM RVDS4 Professional, TI CCS4, I would often run them on different platforms, say Fedora, Ubuntu, and/or XP. The problem is that licenses are often locked on particular machine per ethernet MAC address.
After couple of tries and googling, I figured out how to change MAC address for VMware virtual machines. My host is a Macbook Pro/OS X 10.6, VMware Fusion 3.0.1. My ethernet device is listed as ethernet0. Here’s what I did.
Open virtual machine’s configuration file, .vmx file in your favorite editor, change two lines:
1) ethernet0.addressType = “generated” to “static”, and
2) ethernet0.generatedAddress = “your existing MAC address” to
ethernet0.address = “you new MAC address”

This gives me better opportunity to evaluate software before making the purchase call.

I found out, in another day, that by using MAC address type of vpx, it allows you to use address in the range of “00:50:56:xx:xx:xx.”

Build a custom Linux kernel for Beagleboard

After couple of successful tries to build Angstrom, Android and TI’s MontaVista for Beagleboard since last year, I decided to build a custom kernel with C6x DSP, NEON, OpenGLES2 and JPEG2000 decoder support.
Here are what I have:

MacBook Pro 3.06 G Core 2 Duo, 4G DDR3 and 320G HD.

VMWare Fusion 3 for Mac.

VM Xubuntu (kernel 2.6.31-17) with cross-compiling toolchain built from my earlier projects.

Beagleboard Rev B6.

PL2303 based USB-Serial adapter.

Kensington USB Mini Dock with Ethernet.

Here’s how I did to format a 4G SD card to get started:

FAT32 at first partition for booting

ext3 for file systems

If the SD card is formatted, you will see hidden folders and files, such as .Trashes, created by OS X. You can delete them in Linux VM. To avoid OS X creates them again when you disconnect the SD card from VM, like showed below:
you have to unmount the SD card manually from VM, and then remove it directly from SD card slot off Macbook.

First, let’s partition the SD card. You can also find details from here.
Once the “Apple Internal Memory Card Reader” is connected to VM from Fusion, find out which device is used by running dmesg. In my system, it is /dev/sdb.
Format it by “sudo fdisk /dev/sdb”, followed by fdisk “d” command to delete any existing partitions if there are any. Use “p” command to verify there is no partition left. It may also tell how much space available, and in this case it is:
Disk /dev/sdb: 4041 MB, 4041211904 bytes.

Here’s what I created:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 17 136521 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdb2 18 491 3807405 83 Linux

Don’t forget toggle the bootable flag for the first partition before committing the changes. Then format the first partition with:
mkfs.msdos -F 32 /dev/sdb1 -n boot
and the second partition with:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb2

Mount both partitions to check. Then unmount the partitions and remove the SD card directly from SD card slot. The SD card is ready for boot loader and file system installation.