As described previously, this topic is dedicated to the trials and tribulations of a long-time Windows geek who, under threat of Windows Vista, is slowly defecting to Linux.

The first thing I noticed, while setting up the VMware virtual machine for Ubuntu Linux, was the amount of memory VMware suggested, 256MB. I’ve been using VMware for a few years now, on all sorts of different Windows versions; I know that it tends to estimate low on the memory requirements, but even taking that tendency into account, that seemed way too low for a modern OS. But I figured I’d give it a try, since I could always change it later.

To my surprise, it seems to work just fine. It looks like the installer created a 400MB swap partition on the blank 8GB virtual drive that I allowed it (less than 50MB is in use right now), and although it sometimes does hit the disk for a few seconds, it’s usually pretty fast. I’ll try bumping the virtual machine’s memory size up to 512MB eventually, since I’ve got plenty of memory on the host machine, but for now it’s sufficient.

After installing Ubuntu 7.04 and poking around in the menus for a little bit, I decided that it was time to install the VMware Tools package. For those of you who’ve never played with VMware, the VMware Tools package is partly a video driver, partly a configuration panel, partly a utility that allows the virtual machine to share it’s clipboard with the host machine (which is a lot more useful than you might think), and partly a utility that lets the mouse cursor leave the virtual machine’s confines by simply leaving the window. Without it, you have to press a special combination of keyboard keys to get out of the virtual machine and return to the host machine. It was this last feature that I wanted the most.

And thus the education began.

VMware Tools, under Ubuntu Linux, is not an easy program for a Linux newbie to install. There’s an “rpm” package that would probably automate the entire thing, but as far as I can tell, Ubuntu can’t use that. I fumbled around and found some instructions for it. Unpacking an archive (supplied by VMware) to a temporary directory… no problem, it only took a little experimentation to figure out how to tell Ubuntu’s Nautilus program (similar to Explorer under Windows) to do that. The instructions for running it heavily involve a terminal window, but I’m quite comfortable with a command line. But what’s this… it has to be run under the root account?

I know a little about computer security, and I know about the root account (or “Administrator account” under Windows). But how to get to it? I couldn’t log in as root because I didn’t know the root account’s password. I vaguely recalled hearing about an “su” command, so I tried “su root” in a terminal window… no go, it wanted a password again. Irritated, I used a menu option that I’d noted before, “Users and Groups”, and changed the root password to one I knew, then “su root” worked.

(I’ve since learned that the proper, accepted way to do this sort of thing under Ubuntu is to use the “sudo” command in front of whatever you want to run with root privileges, and your own account’s password when it asks. The root account’s password is now back to a random one, for security purposes.)

But the problems didn’t end there. The installation went extremely smoothly, but one of the files wouldn’t compile due to a problem with it’s parameters. It turns out that it’s an optional networking component, which apparently doesn’t work properly in this installation anyway, because after spending quite a bit of time on it I managed to get it to compile, and it proceeded to wipe out the virtual machine’s networking system. Rather than trying to recover, I reinstalled the OS and VMware Tools package (not installing that optional component), and used VMware’s snapshot capability to ensure that I wouldn’t have to do it again.

I had a fully-working Linux virtual machine, at last.

Next up: figuring out what to do with it. 🙂