I’ve mentioned my love/hate relationship with upgrades before. Yesterday I had another check-mark for the “hate” column.

I’d run into a minor compiler bug in my Ubuntu version of GCC. Since a new version of the OS had just been released the day before, promising even faster bootups and other improvements, I thought I’d upgrade the entire distribution instead of trying to jury-rig an updated compiler into the existing one. Unfortunately, for the first time in a long time, the upgrade (as our British cousins put it) went all pear-shaped.

The OS itself upgraded with no problems, but since it installed a new kernel, I lost my VMware Fusion shared folders. No problem, that’s expected, just reinstall VMware Tools to fix it. That’s where the trouble started.

VMware Tools wouldn’t reinstall properly. Two of the modules wouldn’t compile at all (including the one needed for shared folders), and it claimed that there were no drivers for the X-windows subsystem. I tried rebooting it, but that made things a lot worse because the screen came up as a completely unreadable jumble of horizontal lines as soon as I logged in (the log-in screen itself was fine).

I finally found a way around that (by logging into the recovery terminal and playing with vaguely useful-sounding commands that I no longer recall until I’d set the default log-in resolution to the only one that worked), but it was obvious that something had gone horribly wrong. Several VMware Tools reinstallation attempts gave the same problems, though none of them resulted in the video problems again. The open-vm-tools project (an open-source version of VMware Tools) gave the same results as well.

For a very popular combination like Ubuntu on VMware Fusion, I would expect that such a problem would be widely reported and discussed (as such things always have been in the past), but Google failed to turn up anything remotely similar, no matter how I phrased the search or how far into the results I delved. In fact, I’d found several places on the ‘net that implied that there weren’t any problems.

I figured I just needed an updated version of VMware Tools, since I’ve seen things similar to this before. But I couldn’t find one on the VMware site, or anywhere else trustworthy. One of my searches turned up a page saying explicitly that VMware Player (the free version of the virtualization system) would automatically download an updated version of them when you created a virtual machine with the new Ubuntu, so I spent more than an hour downloading it and the new Ubuntu install disk and installing both onto my wife’s Windows machine so I could extract them. The installation into the virtual machine crashed for reasons unknown, but I was able to extract the new VMware Tools ISO file anyway, and extract the files I needed. To my dismay, they turned out to have the exact same problems that I was already encountering.

To make a long story a little shorter, I eventually created a new virtual machine and installed the new version of Ubuntu from scratch, which worked with no problem. I encountered what seems to be a new bug in the AutoFS system (which cost me several hours of attempted fixes before I gave up and used a less-convenient work-around), grabbed about four hours of sleep, then copied my data to the new virtual machine. I’m about 95% up and running now, and should be up to 99% before the end of the day.

It’s a major consolation that, if I’d still been running Windows instead, it would have taken twice as long to recover from a major problem like this. I had to do it often enough that I had the timing down to a science.