Ran into this while running Vmware Workstation under Ubuntu Jaunty. I got an error while shutting down the machine through an NX session.

This is a result of a zombie ‘vmware-vmx’ process running. All you need to do is kill the process. This command sends ‘signal 9′ to the process. When sent to a program, SIGKILL causes it to terminate immediately. In contrast to SIGTERM and SIGINT, this signal cannot be caught or ignored. For more information: more sigkill info.

killall -s9 vmware-vmx

After that, I was able to start up the virtual machine without issue.

You can remove or configure the Pidgin pop up’s that you see from pidgin. Buddies logging on/off, and in my case, new messages. I didn’t want every new message i receive to be blasted up on the desktop OSD. To control what you see there, Pull up your Pidgin window (buddy window, not your conversation box), then: Tools -> Plugins -> Libnotify Popups. When you have selected the libnotify pop-ups, click on “configure plug-in”. That will give you some check boxes to customize the behaviour