Eclipse on VMPlayer/Ubuntu keeps saying my files have changed on disk.

Question

Spurred on by success stories of developers using VMs I've decided to give it a try. I am running Eclipse on an Ubuntu 9.04 guest, on a WinXP host. Since my networked drive on the host is backed up twice a day, I decided to share my Eclipse workspace with the VM from the networked drive.

All seems good, except on the guest Eclipse frequently pops up warnings that the file has been modified on the file system, and I can either update the editor or ignore. Sometimes the same thing happens when I try to save; I have the option to overwrite the changes on disk, or to discard my changes and reload.

Suspecting the shard on the network drive I copied the files to the C drive of the host and shared from there. Same problem.

Tried it on a friends Mac OS 10.5 using my VM image (on VM Fusion). Same problem.

Doesn't happen when I copy the files to a USB stick and mount it in the VM.

Seems such a shame, since I really like the convenience of sharing the network drive and not having to worry about backups, rsync etc.

Any ideas what's going on ? Any advise appreciated.

Answer 1

Assuming the files themselves did not actually change, I suspect it's the timestamp on the files. Does any other editor have similar issues with the same setup?

Edit: Timestamp bug with VMware, possibly related.

Answer 2

The problem most likely is that the file server and your computer do not have the exact same time. This causes the files to have a different time stamp than expected by Eclipse, and then it complains.