I upgraded my vmware workstation to version 6.5 running on Ubuntu 8.10. All was well except that on the Guest, the following keys were doing their own Bob-Rebel style:

• Arrow keys (up, down,left,right)
• Delete button
• Print Screen (PrtSc) button, in my lotus notes client deleted a selected document - huh?!?
• and probably others as well
  

Well, did some digging around and found the solution: I shutdown my VM, opened my terminal and entered the following:

Note, that will solve for the current user only. If you want it to be applied to the whole VMware workstation configuration for all users then edit the main vmware config file and simply add the property 'xkeymap.nokeycodeMap=true'.
On starting up your VM a "Hint" will pop up and you can just ignore that.

Hope that helps!

A good old db connection using the mysql jdbc driver was giving me problems. Placed the connector in the Catalina_Home\lib etc but just could not connect. Well it turns out the Apache Tomcat v6.0.18 has a default startup script that enables java security by default. There are two ways to solve this.

1) The easy way but surely is not to be done on a production server. Open the tomcat6 startup script like so:  sudo gedit /etc/init.d/tomcat6. Locate these lines of code:

# Use the Java security manager? (yes/no)
TOMCAT6_SECURITY=yes

Change the value from yes to no. Warning, I have no idea of the real implications of doing that other than the obvious - surely your environment will be less secure. Oh, and that my simple jsp tests started working, which is all I really wanted to do.

2) Probably the right way to do it, set the policies properly to allow db connections etc. Typically, in /etc/tomcat6/policy.d/, there are several files where one can set the various policies to allow things such as db connectivity etc. Never really tried it but in theory, can control quite a number of security settings. I shall refer you to the tomcat 6 documentation on how to actually perform that.