VMWare workstation - ova import not working

VMWare workstation - ova import not working

When importing ova and/or ovf files, if Workstation does not give any error but does not import the file as well, try importing the file in VMWare Player. When you do that, you will see that if the import fails, player will show a dialogue with log file name similar to /tmp/vmaware-<amitag>/.

From there, I was able to find out that, it was running ovftool.bin. Try to run that in a terminal and immediately I could see that libnsl was missing so, I just installed the same with

virt-install with cloud-init

If you have not heard about cloud-init then you should definately search for it and learn about cloud-config as well. You can find the documentation for cloud-config here. It is used for configuring VMs when running in cloud environments. Specially useful to inject the ssh keys or set the root password but you can do anything in the cloud-config as there is a section where you can run bash commands. While this is useful for cloud instances, you can make use of this feature when running your vm with qemu or libvirtd. All you need to do is either attach a iso disc with user-data and meta-data files in it or even simpler, you can use virt-install command. The command that I use is as follows

Podman repositories on ubuntu like distros

Recently I installed podman on ubuntu based dervative. I like podman a lot but to my distress I found that after installation, I was not able to search or run any containers. Found out that the repositories were not configured. So, if you run into such issues, then here is what you need to do. You need to create a file /etc/containers/registries.conf. And the contents of the file for just one docker hub registries would be -