I tried setting up Vista as a Guest OS running in Parallels 2.2.2204 on Ubuntu 7.10. After the OS was installed, the next thing I did was the installation of Parallels Tools - the complete install. Each time it prompted for permission to install a device driver I allowed it to install. All device drivers appear to be working properly OTHER than the NIC driver. The NIC is configured in the VM as "Bridged Ethernet; default" I have another Windows VM running XP Pro w/ SP2. Parallels Tools has not been set up yet in that VM and the NIC is already working. I wonder if the NIC was working by default in Vista (via the RTL8029 driver) and installing Parllels Tools broke it... thus should have done a custom install and de-selected the NIC driver? Anyone happen to know how to get the NIC working in a Vista VM?
I did a bit more digging on this issue. I set up another installaion of Vista Business. I opened device manager, indeed an unknown NIC, and there did not appear to be an RTL8029 driver shipped with Vista. Then I mounted the vmtools.iso manually, and pointed the NIC in Device Manager at the Win2000... directory as that appeared to be the highest Windows technology driver avaible for the card. It looked like it was going to accept the driver and install it, but then got this error message: "This operation returned because the timeout period expired." And it does not install the driver, I assume as result of getting that error.
Solution Reinstalled the entire host system with Ubuntu 7.04 rather than Ubuntu 7.10. Faster performance. No more corruption issues with using xfs filesystem. Faster VM performance. AND Vista successfully loads the Parallels NIC driver!!! We will be sticking with Ubuntu 7.04 for now.
