The OS Quest

I had downloaded Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) last night in preparation for installing it tonight. I figured I’d get home and knock out the installation in short order. So I got home put on a pot of coffee and got to it. The good news is that by the second pot of coffee the install was actually running. The additional good news was I had a working installation by the time I was done. The bad news is it took so long I haven’t had a chance to try out Ubuntu yet.

I’m doing a new install, not an upgrade. To keep the problems short and simple - I couldn’t boot the live CD under Parallels but it booted fine on the Mac itself (an Intel Mac) and my PC. Various things, like turning off acpi changed the error but the result was always failure. Here’s how I eventually got a successfull install. (Click on the thumbnail to see the full size image.)

Start Parallels and selected File -> New from the menu to start the installation assistant.

Select a Typical VM and the OS selection screen was displayed. Select Solaris as the OS Type and Solaris 10 as the OS version. Yea, I know, it’s not the right OS. But selecting the “correct” Linux Kernel 2.6 doesn’t work. This one does.

Then you’ll be asked to name the VM. It will default to Solaris, change it to something meaningful, like “Ubuntu”. Expand “More Options” and make sure the folder name was also changed to the name you typed (or similar if the folder already exists).

The last screen in the wizard asks for the CD location. I was installing from the ISO image I downloaded so I selected “ISO Image”, clicked the “Choose…” button and browsed to the ISO file I had downloaded.

When I clicked finish the VM fired up and started booting from the CD image. When the “boot: prompt appears type in “live acpi=off” and hit enter.

The screen then goes blank for a long time. The CD icon in the lower right will flash green to show there’s activity.

Eventually the desktop will appear.

Double-click the “Install” icon on the desktop to start the installation wizard. The first three screen prompts for the language, timezone and keyboard.

The next screen asked about disk partitioning and I accepted the defaults.

This results in a 33.6 GB partition in Ubuntu. But since Parallels only expands the disk as needed the size on the disk once the installation was done was only 2.3GB. Zipping it up for archiving resulted in a 495MB file. (These numbers are right after the fresh install.)

Next up was the migration screen. Since there was a new install there wasn’t anything to migrate. After that was the screen to enter the information for your user account. The computer name defaults to Username-Desktop.

You’re shown your choices. The installation will start when you click “Next”. The installation itself took a very long time, about 20 minutes. The activity lights in the lower right let me know things were moving along.

I restarted. The bootup also took a long time. I thought I was back to my original problems but eventually it came up and I could sign on. I up’d the memory from 256MB to 512MB and the video memory from 4MB to 16MB and this helped on the next reboot which was a reasonable time. Next to it is a screenshot of my newly minted Ubuntu VM desktop.

I checked for updates and there weren’t any.

When I go shut down Ubuntu it hangs up on a blank screen rather than closing out the VM. I wait for the activity lights to stop then shut down the VM.

I decide to change things over from the Solaris settings. I open the settings for the VM (Edit -> Virtual machine from the menu when the VM configuration summary screen is displayed) and change to OS type to Linux - Other Linux Kernel 2.6.

The disk image for the virtual machine is still named “Solaris” which annoys me even though it shouldn’t cause a problem. The image files are stored in ~/Library/Parallels by default. There’s a subdirectory for each VM and the image file is in there with a “.hdd” extension. I renamed the file to Ubuntu.hdd. Then I opened Ubuntu.pvs (located in the same directory) in Text Editor. Locate the line that says “Disk 0:0 image = solaris10.hdd” and change solaris10.hdd to Ubuntu.hdd (or whatever you called the file) and save the file. The line may be different if you used different values during the setup. Make sure you use Text Editor or another editor that won’t change the format of the file.

Exploring Ubuntu will have to wait for another time, but at least it’s installed.

Ubuntu is available from their website. Clicking the image to the left will help support this site and bring you to the Parallels web page where you can download a trial. If you’d prefer not to use the affiliate link you can click here to visit the parallels site.

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