While I end up using Mac OS X as my primary GUI, I still do a lot of development work on Linux. I'm using VMware Fusion to host a virtual headless Linux machine, which is all good. Recently I decided to upgrade my OS to Ubuntu 8.04, which promotes have a just-enough OS (jeOS), which seemed perfect for what I wanted to do. Unfortunately the process of getting the VMware client tools installed was less than simple. Cut a long story short, the fix is described by Peter Coooper, and things work well after that. (It is a little annoying that the Ubuntu documentation doesn't explain this, or link to this.).
Anyway, after this I'm able to share my home directory directly between OS X, and my virtual machine, which is absolutely fantastic, as I'm not using TRAMP or some network filesystem to shuffle files back and forth between the virtual machine and the main machine.
Unfortunately, I ran into a bit of a problem, specifically, history
was not working in zsh. Specifically
saving the history into the history file was not working, which is a
really painful situation. It was not really clear why that was, running
fc -W manually didn't work either, but managed to fail
silently, no stderr output, and no error code returned.
Failing this I went back to the massively useful debugging tool
strace.
This finally gave me the clue that link() (hard linking) was
failing. I confirmed that using ln.
So, it turns out that the VMware hgfs file system doesn't support
hard linking, which is a real pain, especially since the underlying OS
X file system supports hard linking. So I'm down to the work around of storing
my history file in /tmp rather than my home directory, which
is slightly annoying, but not the end of the world.
As it turns out I'm not the first to discover this, Roger C. Clermont also found this out a few days ago. With any luck we will find a solution in the near future.