Laurent’s Weblog

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