Ubuntu Server and VMware Fusion

by Sebastien Mirolo on Sat, 17 Oct 2009

Anticipated the upcoming next release of Ubuntu, I decided to setup an Ubuntu Server Edition sandbox under VMware to test the configuration scripts. I do not know about you, but I feel a little anxious about upgrading the customer-facing Internet server, fixing bugs in real-time.

VMware Fusion's update tool suggested me to download and install version 2.06. I did that then created an Ubuntu sandbox virtual machine and installed the 64-bit Server Edition ISO image (ubuntu-9.04-server-amd64.iso).

That is when I tried to mount an OSX user account folder on the sandbox virtual machine that things starting to break down. The "Install VMware Tools" menu did not seem to do anything. I could not find the VMware Tools .tar.gz package anywhere on the filesystem either. Hopefully, I already had a Ubuntu Desktop Edition virtual machine and the VMware Tools DVD-ROM mounted correctly there as /media/cdrom1/VMwareTools-7.9.7-196839.tar.gz. Since I already had setup that Ubuntu Desktop Edition virtual machine with an ssh server, I remote copied the package onto the Ubuntu Server Edition sandbox. After installing the VMware tools and rebooting the virtual machine, I could then access the OSX files through /mnt/hgfs/username as usual.

# On the Ubuntu Desktop Edition virtual machine:
ifconfig | grep 'inet addr'
# On the Ubuntu Server Edition virtual machine:
scp ipaddress:/media/cdrom1/VMwareTools-7.9.7-196839.tar.gz .
tar zxvf VMwareTools-7.9.7-196839.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
sudo shutdown -r 0

I still cannot copy or paste from and to the Ubuntu Server Edition virtual machine and still require to use ctrl + command key combination; maybe because there is no X11 installed on that virtual machine. In any case, I have a way to move files from the OSX filesystem to the Ubuntu Server Edition sandbox so debugging of the upgrade path for the live server is under way.

by Sebastien Mirolo on Sat, 17 Oct 2009