I recently installed Leopard on my Mac and lost a VMWare appliance of Linux (Oracle Enterprise Linux), instrumented with an Oracle database , that i ran before on Mac OS X Tiger using VMWare Fusion beta.
So i decided to install the last release of Ubuntu , Hardy Heron 8.04 :
- Firstly to have a simple platform with a Ruby on Rails stack for testing my current project Sudorace on Linux.
- Secondly i chose Ubuntu and not RedHat EL again (neither CentOS) because i currently do not need an instance of Oracle database for my personal purposes (i follow the YAGNI “You Ain’t Gonna Need It”). Working all business days in a full Oracle environment, i do not need now this kind of environment for my personal purposes; if tomorrow i should have an Oracle database instance, or an App Server, so i will install again the “Enterprise Linux” from Oracle.
I use VMWare Fusion , because i encountered problems while installing Linux with Parallels at a time. It seems Parallels team first focused on running Windows well.
About VMWare:
VMWare is the leader in virtual infrastructures for years. I remember a time near 2003, when we used VMWare to run Linux on a Windows host, for testing an Oracle database & Oracle RAC. VMWare declined the Mac version (VMWare fusion) once Apple switched to x86, but after Parallels.
Register for an evaluation or purchase a license then download VMWare Fusion
Download Ubuntu 8.04
Burn the ISO on a CD-R or keep it on your Hard Drive (you can install Ubuntu with VMWare Fusion from the ISO file)
Create a virtual machine with VMWare Fusion
Launch VMWare Fusion
Click the New button
Click Continue
Choose Linux then Ubuntu, and click Continue
Select name (Ubuntu Hardy Heron) and Location (mine is ~/Library/VMWare)
Specify HDD size
Check “Start virtual machine and install OS now” then choose the ISO file for Ubuntu, or the CD.
Click Finish, then Ubuntu installation starts.
As every Linux install you’ll have a few questions to answer before the installation starts.
Choose the language
Choose the timezone
Choose the keyboard : in my case US English – Mac (i have a qwerty keyboard)
And the installation starts… you can relax ~20 minutes.
Once Ubuntu installed shut down the system, and before next reboot, verify all the devices are well connected
Now the systems starts up.
Enter your login/password you setup during installation
VMWare Tools
Verify you have gcc installed. To install it, launch the command in a Terminal : sudo apt-get install build-essential
Install VMWare Tools :
Choose from the menu Virtual Machine -> Install VMWare Tools
The following packages will be downloaded
Copy VMWareTools-e.x.p-*.tar.gz to /tmp then in a Terminal window untar the tarball (tar xzvf VMWareTools-e.x.p*.tar.gz).
[UPDATE] Thanks for comments.
“It turns out that some changes to the Linux kernel — Ubuntu 8.04 uses Linux 2.6.24 — have introduced some issues that make running Ubuntu in a VMWare virtual machine difficult. Ubuntu will install just fine, but you won’t have access to VMWare Tools, which provides some nice features like shared folders and clipboard syncing.
While VMWare hasn’t released a solution yet, the company did recently open source its VM Tools and there’s already a very nice post in the VMWare forums on how to integrate the needed packages from open-vm-tools into into vmtools.” [Wired]
Install open-vmware-tools
Pre-requisities :
sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev
cd Desktop/
Download from SourceForge Open VM Tools
Untar open-vm-tools-2008.05.02-90473.tar.gz
cd open-vm-tools-2008.05.02-90473/
./configure && make
cd modules/linux/
In the modules/linux folder we have the vmblock, vmhgfs, vmmemctl, vmsync and vmxnet modules that we need to tar up and place into the official VMware tools tarball:
for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done
cd ../../..mv -f open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/modules/linux/*.tar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/
Now we can run the regular VMware tools installer:
cd vmware-tools-distrib
Launch the installation : sudo ./vmware-install.pl
I’ve not compared all the features between a Linux installed on Parallels and Linux installed on VMWare Fusion, but what we can do with VMWare Fusion is the following :
DragDrop Files between Mac OS X & the virtual machine, Copy & Paste text between Mac OS X & the virtual machine, Moving the cursor between Mac OS X & the virtual machine, support for Airport Wireless network, Mounting USB drives, Resizing the Virtual Machine window.
Share Folder:
You can setup a Shared Folder on Mac OS X from VMWare Fusion (Virtual Machine settings)
From Ubuntu, the Public folder will be shown into /mnt/hgfs folder.
Now , if you want to install a complete RoR stack, you should follow the steps i described for the Debian Etch.
[UPDATE] Source for VMWare Tools fixing : Peter Cooper’s blog
24 Comments
Did you actually get the tools to build? I just installed VMware Fusion 1.1.2 with the tools version 7.6.3-87978 from the menu and all modules failed to build. This is a problem with the 2.6.24 kernel, and as far as I know has not been officially fixed yet.
Did you have any trouble installing the vmware-tools at all? I am getting a compile error when it tries to compile the vmmemctl module. I am wondering if there is something missing that is needed? Thanks for this great how-to and any help you can give.
Hi there. Just had to say thanks for the VM Ware tools part. Followed your directions and took me less then 5 minutes. Keep up the good work and have fun.
ceres, try this URL:
http://peterc.org/2008/62-how-to-install-vmware-tools-on-ubuntu-hardy-804-under-vmware-fusion.html#comment-262
I followed it to the letter and it all worked out. Literally cut and paste, though I claim I actually had *some* idea of what was going on.
I’ve just installed it but I can’t get the cursor to move at all.
Did a second installation, same problem
dixon1e, thanks! It did the trick!
Some notes:
- actually compiling the source was not required… just downloading and packing up the modules was
- the bash script he created to pack up the source didn’t quite work for me so I just manually renamed all of the module directories to have “-only” at the end and then manually tared the files with out the “-only” at the end, and moved the files over
Nice guide. Thank you so much.
Just to point out, there is another command called vmware-tools-updater. It also seems to figure out the modules. But I still had problems with drag ‘n drop files from host to guest. This guide helped solve that issue.
Keep up the good work.;;
I also needed to
$ sudo apt-get install libicu-dev
to get the ./configure && make to work.
All work pretty well!
But, I still have a question : have you any idea of how to make the /mnt/hfs/ available for a non super user in linux, and keep file permission unchanged ?
Typing “chmod 770 -R” works find to get access but it dramatically changes permission in MacOSX.
Thanks!!!
Thank you so much!!!!
Bonjour.
Sauf erreur, vous deviez comprendre le français…
Pourriez=vous m’aider ?
Je viens de réussir à installer Ubuntu 8.04 ce jour 7 juin.
Par contre, je ne parviens pas à installer les VMWareTools.
Il me faut vous dire que, ormis le fait que les explications données sur votre blog sont en anglais, elles sont un peu du chinois pour moi.
En effet, je ne fais que me laisser guider.
Je suis loin d’être un spécialiste et mon but et de découvrir Linux, que je ne connais pas du tout.
La preuve : je ne trouve pas comment taper une arobase…
Pourriez-vous me dire, en termes aussi simples que possibles, ce que je dois faire.
Merci beaucoup.
DF
Sur Mac OS X.5.3 avec Fusion dernière version
Thanks a lot!
This worked like a charm. Thanks so much!
@dewphy: You can edit /etc/fstab, putting “uid=1000,gid=1000″ at the end of the options (or whatever your uid and gid are — use the “id” command to find out).
Thanx for your guide brother. It just took me 5 mins and everything is working perfectly..
Works perfectly–thanks a bunch!
Worked great. Thanks so much!
I hit a snag when trying to move the stuff from open-vm-tools to the vmware-tools-distrib. I got an error that said that the directory i was trying to move to wasn’t found. I was wondering if I needed to install the vmware tools from vmware fusion before I did anything. The vmware tools wouldn’t install for me(could have been I was too impatient but it wasn’t done after 8 hours). Any help would be great since I am new to linux and don’t know too much about what I am doing.
Thank you so much -
I never would have gotten it up and running otherwise!
Excellent instructions.
I tried this on a fresh install of Ibex on VMware Fusion and quickly descended into dependency hell. Therefore I don’t recommend anyone doing this until these instructions have been updated.
[WARNING] Apple Times online affirmed to follow this article, done for Hardy Heron, for Ibex.
ggore tried and affirms there are many problems.
As a reminder, this article is for 8.0.4 not 8.10 : so becomes obsolete for 8.10
A new article will come for 8.10
I just wrote an article in my blog about installing Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 on VMware Fusion 2.0.
This article with many screenshots is in French but it should be quite easy to understand
I don’t understand why you compare Ubuntu to Redhat EL.. They are vastly different, but you comparing rational doesn’t make sense to me either.
First off, Redhat isn’t a personal distro. Comparing to Ubuntu you would look at Fedora. Secondly, neither RedHat nor Fedora should require Oracle. I’ve used the three of these Distro’s for years and haven’t put Oracle DB on any of my systems.
My point isn’t that Ubuntu is a bad choice; just that I’m not sure you should exclude RedHat based systems for the reason that you did.
That being said, while I have often enjoyed Fedora, I thought Fedora 9 was rather on the poorer side. Not as stable and too fragmented because of the changes being put in looking toward F10 and beyond. This was one of the major things that drove me to ubuntu.
Many thanks for this write-up. VMWare seems to have streamlined their installation procedure for VMWare Tools somewhat since this article was written but this gave me a good idea of what to expect. Anyway I just installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my iMac under VMWare Fusion 2.1 last Friday night and I have to say it really turned out to be pretty painless, even for a GUI using newbie like myself.
After installing Ubuntu desktop (32-bit version) on a new Linux VM, directly from the DL’d ISO image, per the first part of this article, then logging into Ubuntu for the first time, I tried to install VMWare Tools from the Virtual Machine menu. At first, nothing happened.
VMWare had complained something about a drive door being locked though, so I canceled the tools installation in the Virtual Machine menu, then right-clicked the Ubuntu installer ISO image that I had found already mounted on my desktop and selected Unmount Volume from the pop-up menu. After that, I tried the install VMWare Tools again and viola, a VMWare Tools CD Image showed up on my desktop.
The VMWare Tools image contained a single zipped tar file which I right-clicked and extracted to my home folder. Then I selected Home Folder from the Ubuntu Places menu, and opened the “vmware-tools-distrib” folder that the extractor had created. Inside that was a file named INSTALL, which opened in a text editor when I double-clicked it.
Following the instructions I found in the INSTALL text file, I opened a terminal window and ran the accompanying PERL script, vmware-install.pl. The instructions said the script required root/superuser priveleges to run so I just did:
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
After confirming my login credentials the script ran and did the rest. It first performed some test and decided it’s precompiled binaries wouldn’t work, then it asked me if I wanted it to compile them from the sources. I said OK and it did. All I really had to do throughout the entire process was hit the Enter key a few times when prompted. When it was done it ran it’s config script and asked me to pick a screen resolution, That was about it.
It did flash a message on exit that there were some things it couldn’t do/build/turn on/whatever the first time through and that I would need to run the script again to add those, but none of it looked like anything I cared much about, so I haven’t done that as yet. Anyway, everything seems to be working fine so far.
3 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] Peter Cooper & Laurent’s Weblog) Hier war es VMwareTools-e.x.p-116369.tar.gz [...]
[...] for 2008-10-15 Woven at 2008-10-15T9:04, coloured with Links, Mac OS X. Install Ubuntu 8.04 using VMware Fusion on Mac OS X « Laurent’s Weblog … just because I *can*. (tags: vmware ubuntu mac howto osx [...]
[...] Bois wrote up a fantastic guide for installing Ubuntu 8.04 in VMware Fusion, but the process for 8.10 is exactly the same. If you are using Fusion, be sure to take note of the [...]