Installing Konqueror
You may fail to explicitly install Konqueror during the intitial Fedora 8 setup. Konqueror can be used as a convenient file manager/browser and can save you some time by eliminating unnecessary typing.

Note that Konqueror can be used both in GNOME and KDE environments. If cd / and find . konqueror | grep konqueror return only .png images, this means that Konqueror is not there yet and you need to install it. The tricky part is that Konqueror won’t appear explicitly within the Package Manager. To get it, click search within Package Manager and type Konqueror in the search field. Select the “All Package” radio button and hit search. Select all packages that appear in a list and install them.

Though we didn’t select Konqueror, it will be installed for your convenience. As in previous Fedora/Red Hat distributions, the Konqueror icon will appear by default under Applications | Internet. Within GNOME you may want to right-click on the icon and select “Add this launcher to panel.” After that you may want to add the launcher to the desktop in a similar way. Adding items to the main panel and a desktop can be done using the above descriptions for GNOME as a sample within KDE.

Dealing with 'Windows – No Disk Exception Processing Message…' on Windows XP Host
When you use several removable HDDs, from time to time you’ll came across certain Windows bugs (okay, perhaps the Windows crowd will label it as a “feature”); when you attempt to start VMWare 5, a message similar to this will appear: “Windows - no disk Exception Processing Message c0000013 Parameters 75b6bf9c 4 75b6bf9c 75b6bf9c”. What should you do?

Most likely the reason is that a letter assigned to your removable HDD in which at least one VM is located got messed up. It was called a bug since you probably didn’t directly assign letters to removable drives. In theory, Windows XP should take care of the assignment, but it fails to do so from time to time. To fix the consequences of the bug, do the following:

A letter was assigned to your removable HDD during the last successful run of VMWare 5, e.g., “G”. Said observation will be easy to make if you create a shortcut to the HDD, which can be useful anyway. Go to Control Panel | Performance and Maintenance | Administrative Tools | Computer Management | Disk Management.

Now this letter is assigned to something else (say to another device). Right-click on the area with this letter and select “Change Drive Letter and Path” from the context menu. Click “Change” on the window that will appear. In the next window, select another letter for the device (e.g., “P”). Now “G” is free, so assign it to your removable HDD as described earlier. If you created a new VM with Fedora 8 when the letter assignments were messed up, and restored the correct letter for the device later, VMWare 5 will offer several options about certain unique numbers related to the VM that are used in VMWare 5 for internal purposes. Just select “Generate…” from the options and you’ll be set.

Fedora 8 Remote Desktop Within Windows XP
In some cases it will be enough to use the limited screen space provided by VMWare 5 by default in which the Fedora 8 desktop (such as KDE) is displayed. However, you may want to increase it for your convenience. As described earlier, perhaps you don’t want to install VMWare tools, which is the standard VMWare 5 way of doing so. A possible solution is to use the XDMCP (X Display Manager Control Protocol) based Windows program that will serve as a Fedora 8 remote desktop. A free open source program called Xming available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming can be used for this purpose. Later in this article Xming version 6.9.0.31 will be used as the latest one at the time of writing. Adjust your settings accordingly if you plan on using the newer version. First make certain settings related to the login window. A convenient way to do this is to log in to Fedora 8 VM as a privileged user. Say you'll use KDE. In this case select System | Login Window.

In the Remote tab, select “Same as local” style and then select Enable accessible login in the Accessibility tab.

Relax default security restrictions as will be described below (please refer to the “best of both worlds” concept section of this article on why it is acceptable to do so in our case). In the General tab, uncheck ‘Disable multiple logins for a single user,’ then in the security tab select ‘Allow local system administrator login,’ ‘Allow remote system administrator login,’ and ‘Allow login if group write permissions on user’s home directory.’

Now you need to edit several config files within Fedora 8. It’s best to do so with gedit. To avoid extra typing, you may want to use Konqueror as follows. Start Konqueror and go to /etc/X11/xdm. Right-click on Xacess file. Select Open With | Other from a context menu and type gedit in the “Open With” textbox. Hit the Enter key. Xaccces file will be opened in gedit.  Delete comments (which are #) at the beginning of the following lines:

*    #any host can get a login window
and
*   CHOOSER BROADCAST   # any indirect host can get a chooser.

Note that an alternate and convenient way to do so is to use the WinSCP embedded editor. Now you need to edit the /etc/X11/xdm/xdm.conf file. Put an exclamation mark at the beginning of the string (i.e., comment this):

DisplayManager.requestPort:

Make sure that /etc/inittab contains the following lines:

# Run xdm in runlevel 5
id:5:initdefault:
x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon

Also change /etc/gdm/custom.conf. The Enable feature within [xdmcp] section should be set to true as follows (note that you should not put a dot after the word “true” below):

Enable=true.