townx - Installing Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) as a guest operating system on VMware - Comments

thanks!

FG — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:55:03 -0500

man... for the longest time i couldn't get display scaling to work... copy and paste worked fine because i knew vmware-tools had to be running... but "vmware-user" was the magik utility that needs to be running for the scaling to work. Thanks man!

Thanks again Sean. I'll edit

elliot — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 07:18:41 -0500

Thanks again Sean. I'll edit the main article as suggested. Haven't installed Feisty on VMware yet, but hopefully it will be pretty similar.

Feisty Fawn instructions and a simplification

Sean Flanigan — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 11:11:57 -0500

Hi Eliot, I don't know if you plan to have a Feisty guide, but I've just installed the Feisty release candidates for Ubuntu and Kubuntu in VMware, and I thought I'd spam your comments with a note for future reference ;-).

I wasn't really following this guide most of the time (just following my nose), but the steps seem pretty similar. I did give up on some of the fiddly steps, such as coaxing the fast networking module to compile. Other than that, I think I got it all working. However, along the way vmware-user complained even more about those shared libraries, so I replaced the "ln" commands in step 17.1 with just:
ln -st /usr/lib /usr/lib/vmware-tools/lib32/lib*/lib*.

You could use that in the Edgy guide too. It's less typing.

Sean.

That's not too bad; I just

elliot — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 09:36:41 -0500

That's not too bad; I just remember some apps. trying to install the whole of KDE before they would run. I might give it a try as it sounds useful for other stuff too.

KDocker

Sean Flanigan — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 01:47:59 -0500

Well, I can't tell you how much of KDE it might depend on, but it claims to work with KDE, GNOME, Xfce, Fluxbox and others. I'm running it with Xfce, and visually it fits in fine.

Looking in aptitude, it seems to be in the x11/universe category along with xfce and icewm, not the kde category. But I see it does depend on libqt3-mt, so I suppose it won't be an option if you're trying to avoid loading QT.

Hi Sean. Funny, I kept

elliot — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 14:23:15 -0500

Hi Sean. Funny, I kept getting that error when I was trying out the --iconify flag. Is KDocker a KDE thing? That would be what put me off it, as I try to avoid install KDE software and messing up my pretty Ubuntu interface :)

Putting vmware-toolbox in the system tray

Sean Flanigan — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 10:27:25 -0500

Hi Elliot, I've discovered one other thing. KDocker is an easier alternative than AllTray, because it's part of the Ubuntu repositories.

But unfortunately, the vmware-toolbox process has a habit of disappearing. It then refuses to run again, at least for a while:
Warning: Error in the RPC recieve loop: RpcIn: Unable to send
Warning: Another instance of VMware Tools Properties may be running.

I haven't got to the bottom of this problem. Google is apparently not my friend.

Sean.
(No web page yet.)

Installing Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) as a guest operating system on VMware

elliot — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:39:03 -0500

Note: This is an update of my earlier set of instructions about installing Ubuntu Dapper as a guest operating system on VMware.

This time I'm using VMware Workstation 5.5.3 build-34685 and Ubuntu Dapper as the host operating system. I am installing Ubuntu Edgy as the guest operating system. I also worked out how to get the VMware Tools to work. Here's what I did:

Downloaded the Ubunutu .iso file from http://ubuntu.org/. (I tried to install off CD and failed miserably: it hung when it tried to create the Ubuntu Live CD user.)
Created a new virtual machine in VMware (I accepted all the defaults). I set the hard disk to 4Gb which should be big enough.
Edit the virtual machine and set its CD to use an ISO image; point it at the Ubuntu .iso file you downloaded.
Boot the virtual machine. Press enter when prompted to install Ubuntu. This will boot into the Live CD version of Ubuntu.
Once in, double-click the "Install" icon on the desktop to install the Live CD image onto the hard disk.
Follow through the installation procedure.
When you power off ready for reboot, you can point the CD for the virtual machine back at the physical drive (I used the "autodetect" setting). This prevents the virtual machine booting from the CD image in future (you can delete the image once you've completed the install, if you want).
Boot into Ubuntu. You are now using the hard disk installation rather than the Live CD image.
Upgrade all the packages on the system. You do this by clicking on the orange asterisk icon on the right-hand side of the top menu bar. You'll also need the networking to be up to do this. It takes quite a while, but it's worth doing.
Select the VM > Install VMware Tools option from the VMware workstation menu. You should get a CD icon on your Ubuntu desktop; if not, go to Places and choose the CD there.
Copy the .tar.gz file to your desktop. Right click on it and select "Extract here". This will give you a folder called vmware-tools-distrib.
Get a console up and cd to the vmware-tools-distrib directory.
Make yourself root (sudo su).
The installation requires a recent gcc and the Linux headers. Fortunately, these both appear to be installed by default on Edgy, so you don't need to do anything (unlike the previous set of instructions for Dapper).
It's worth creating a symlink to your kernel source to make the installer run more smoothly (it looks for /usr/src/linux and complains if it's not there):
ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r` /usr/src/linux
While you're still in the vmware-tools-distrib directory, run the install script:
./vmware-install.pl
I accepted all the default settings and said yes to everything.
This gets everything (pretty much) working except the mouse. You can fix this like so:
1. sudo ln -s /usr/lib/vmware-tools/configurator/XOrg/7.0/vmmouse_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/
2. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and find the section headed Section "InputDevice", with the line Driver "mouse". Change the Driver "mouse" line so it reads Driver "vmmouse".
To get copy and paste working, you have to run vmware-toolbox inside the virtual machine; to get the "Autofit Guest" feature requires the vmware-user program to be running in the virtual machine. You can enable both of these applications to start when your Edgy virtual machine starts like so:
1. First, you need to symlink a couple of VMware libraries so that Ubuntu knows where to find them (for running vmware-user). At a command prompt, run this command:
  ln -st /usr/lib /usr/lib/vmware-tools/lib32/lib*/lib*
2. Go to the main Ubuntu menu (inside the virtual machine) and select System > Preferences > Sessions. Then select the Startup Programs tab.
3. Click on the Add button and type vmware-user in the text box. Click on OK.
4. Click on the Add button and type vmware-toolbox --minimize in the text box. Click on OK. Note that this window must always be open for cut and paste between the guest OS and the host one to work. If you want to push it into the system tray, you could use AllTray to do that. There is an --iconify flag for this command, which should presumably turn it into an icon, but it doesn't seem to work for me.
As I'm using a widescreen laptop, I also had to edit the settings for my screen resolution in the Section "Screen", e.g.:
Modes "1280x768" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
This works fine on my IBM Z60t.
Logout and kill X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. This should make all your new settings come alive.

Hurrah! It works!

Credits: Thanks to Sean Flanigan for extra tips on enabling cut and paste and guest window resizing.