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Installing Ubuntu 8.10 in Fusion

If you have a Mac and Fusion this article will get you started with a safe way to install Ubuntu without having to mutli-boot your Mac. In this article we’ll be discussing installation of Ubuntu using a commercial virtualization product from VMware called Fusion, in the coming days we’ll also look at Virtual Box an opensource project similar to VMware Fusion.

VMware Fusion is the OS X equivalent to VMware Workstation or VMware Server (free), which runs on Linux and Windows. These products allow you to virtualize operating systems without having to format your main desktop or laptop hard drive. We are going to look at a the installation of Ubuntu 8.10 inside of VMware Fusion and discuss some caveots you may encounter along the way. Before we begin we’ll assume you have the Ubuntu 8.10 ISO image downloaded and you have the latest version of VMware Fusion installed.

Like most virtualization desktop products VMware Fusion uses a very simple GUI wizard to guide the user through the installation allowing them advanced installation options if they wish. Throughout the article, I will reference (Figure X) to correspond with the correct images which are displayed at the end of the article.

Virtual Machine Creation

  • Open Fusion and create a new virtual machine by navigating to File > New from here a new window will appear (Figure 1).
  • Next, select “Continue without disk“, this will bring you to another window (Figure 2) allowing you to select the installation media. Select “Use Operating system installation disk image file ” select the Ubuntu ISO image, then click “Continue“.
  • Next, select the operating system and distribution type (this will default to Linux, Ubuntu 32bit) and click “Continue” as shown in (Figure 3).
  • Finally, You will be presented with a finalization window displaying the current settings of your virtual machine. If you wish to make further advanced customizations to the memory, cpu, disk and so you can select the “Customize settings” button. You can also have the virtual machine automatically start when Fusion is opening by putting a check in the “Always open this virtual machine when VMware Fusion starts” option. (Figure 4)
  • Once you are satisfied with your settings click, “Finish” to build the virtual machine and continue with the Ubuntu installation. You will be prompted to enter a name for the virtual machine once you finalize your settings.

Ubuntu Installation

  • NOTE: Once you click in the virtual machine window your keyboard and mouse are locked in, press Control-Command to release it.
  • Your virtual machine will now restart and the Ubuntu installation will begin (Figure 5), select the appropriate language and press “enter“.
  • Next, you will be presented with a menu (Figure 6) using the arrow keys select the “Install Ubuntu” option and press “enter“. Installation will begin as shown in (Figures 6 and 7). Once the installer has loaded a new window will be presented starting the actual installation (Figure 8 ) the language you selected in the previous screen should already be highlighted. Click “Forward“.
  • On the next screen select your timezone and click “Forward” (Figure 9), select your keyboard language layout (Figure 10), click “Forward“.
  • Next, you are presented with the disk partitioner. We are going to use the defaults here which is “Guided – use entire disk“, click “Forward” to continue the installation.(Figure 11)
  • Next, you will be presented with a series of questions pertaining to setup of your user account. Fill in the fields with the acceptable information and click “Forward“. (Figure 12)
  • At this point installation is ready to begin, look over the proposed settings and click “Install” when you are ready. This will take a few minutes to complete. (Figure 13)
  • Figures 14, 15, 16 , 17 , 18 and 19 are examples of what you can expect along the way during installation.
  • When the installation is completed you will be prompted with a windows requiring you to restart the computer. Before doing this click the “Settings” button on the Fusion menu, navigate to the CDROM and disconnect it by un-checking the box, you will be given a warning select “Yes“. Once the CDROM is disabled, click “Restart now” to finalize and reboot (Figure 20).
  • Once your machine has rebooted you will be prompted with a login screen as shown in (Figure 21) enter the username and password you specified during installation to log into Ubuntu.

VMware Tools Installation

Now that our Ubuntu desktop installation is complete we need to install some additional tools in order to maximize productivity. VMware provides a utility called VMware Tools, which allows you to share folders, the keyboard and mouse between the virtual machine and the host operating system, in this case OS X and Ubuntu.

  • Once you are logged into the Ubuntu Desktop, you will want to install all the latest updates for Ubuntu to ensure the VMware tools install correctly. To do this, goto System > Administrator > Update Manager, click the “Check” button and enter your password if required.  Updates will be displayed, finally click “Install Updates“. This may take awhile depending on your Internet connection speed and the amount of updates required. Once completed, reboot your Ubuntu Desktop.
  • Once rebooted, Click the “Virtual Machine” menu bar while in Fusion. From here select the “Install VMware Tools” option. You will notice a CDROM being mounted on your Ubuntu desktop, drag the file to your desktop and double click it and drag the contents to the desktop. (Figures 22 and 23)
  • Next, we need to drop to a terminal and install a couple pieces of software. Navigate to Applications > Accessories > Terminal at the command prompted enter the following “cd ~Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib” and  “sudo apt-get install build-essential” to install the compilers needed for the VMware tools installation. If prompted enter your password, a confirmation dialogue will appear enter “y” and press enter. (Figure 25)
  • Once complete, run the following command to begin the VMware tools installer “sudo ./vmware-install.pl“. To save room I did not include the output from the installer, however, you can select the defaults throughout by pressing “enter” for each question.
  • Reboot once the VMware tools installation has completed, log in to your Ubuntu Desktop and then maximize the screen. VMware tools should automatically resize your desktop to fix your screen and your mouse should flow from Ubuntu to OS X without issue.
  • Enjoy Ubuntu 🙂

Below are the images referenced during installation.

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JeOSVMBuilder and VMware ESX

Virtualization is one thing that really gets me motivated, I primaly work with VMware’s ESX products however, I’ve recently been looking at alternative solutions such as Xen and Virtualbox to broaden my knowledge further. Earlier this year I co-wrote an article with Matthew Helmke on Ubuntu Jeos for Linux+ magazine. The other day I was looking at some Jeos information on the Ubuntu website and stumbled upon the vmbuilder application. 

The vmbuilder application will let you quickly build a virtual machine for a variety of virtualization products Xen, VMware Workstation, VMware Server, kvm and so on. Vmbuilder is very slick, after a couple software installations and I was building a VMware Server image on my Ubuntu desktop without any hassles. I then used VMware converter to import and convert the virtual machine to a VMware ESX compatible format. For those who might not know, VMware Server can use IDE based disks where as ESXi/ESX requires SCSI based disks.

I was curious as to why the vmbuilder application didn’t have support for the VMware ESX and noticed salf.dk submitted a patch to the vmbuilder application which extends the features allowing for ESXi/ESX vmdk creation. I promptly decided to test this patch and it worked well, however I noticed that the template for ESXi was setting the maximum CPU’s to “2”. Normally, in a ESXi/ESX environment you don’t need to pre-allocate multiple cpu’s to your virtual machine upfront because of the way ESXi/ESX handles resources.

So, I submitted a change based off the patch from salf.dk,  to allow a new CPU variable to be set during the build stage of a virtual machine.

I hope the maintainer of the vmbuilder project will merge the ESXi patches provided, this will be a nice alternative for mass producing test Ubuntu servers running ESXi/ESX environments.

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Ubuntuforums.org Upgrade

Over the past weekend I took the ubuntuforums.org site offline and upgraded the software to the latest Vbulletin 3.8 release candidate. Previously we had been running version 3.7.4p1 and felt the 3.8 serious was stable enough to move forward with even though its still a RC. The upgrade took about an hour and gave the forum community improved features to Social Groups, Private Messages, Profile Privacy, Albums and other misc fixes. 

Thanks again to everyone helped test and find bugs after the upgrade.