Install Ubuntu 7.04 on Your Intel Mac with VMware Fusion
May 2nd, 2007
The latest version of Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn, has been getting a lot of press recently. With news that Dell will soon be pre-installing Ubuntu on some of its systems, it’s almost certain that Ubuntu will only become more popular in the coming months. If you have an Intel Mac and would like to experiment with Ubuntu’s newest release what is the easiest way?
It seems there are 3 possible ways to try Ubuntu 7.04 on your Mac.
- Install Ubuntu directly to your hard drive.
- Install Ubuntu in Parallels (available at Amazon
).
- Install Ubuntu in VMWare Fusion (available at Amazon
).
Installing Ubuntu directly to your hard drive might be a good idea if you have a spare drive that you can use. From the instructions I’ve seen online, installing Ubuntu on a partition alongside OS X is not for the faint of heart. Personally, I’m not willing to risk all of my data and my OS X install on an experiment to see if I can install Ubuntu.
Installing Ubuntu 7.04 in Parallels is not such a walk in the park either. There seem to be some problems with the latest Linux kernels and Parallels. When trying to install, Ubuntu will not be able to properly load the cd-rom driver and will fail to install. There are some (rather odd) workarounds for this, such as telling Parallels that you’re using Solaris during the install process. The guys at SimpleHelp have a tutorial that will help you get Ubuntu 7.04 installed in Parallels. Don’t expect things to work perfectly once it’s installed. I still experienced problems with the video drivers and screen resolution as well intermittent problems getting cd-roms to mount. The Ubuntu startup and shutdown screens also fail to display in Parallels. You’re left with a black screen wondering if anything is happening during the boot process. There are other annoyances such as the virtual machine failing to full shut itself down, a bug that causes most progress bars to be transparent, and the constant need to hit a key combination to release the cursor from Ubuntu and get back to Mac OS. Features such as Coherence and dragging files between Parallels and Mac OS are also not supported.
Because of all the problems with Parallels, I decided to give the VMware Fusion Beta a try. While Parallels may have beat everyone else to the Intel Mac virtualization market, VMware have been doing virtualization for much longer. With the Fusion Beta, they bring their years of experience to the Mac platform. Does it work any better with Ubuntu? The short answer is YES!
I was able to install Ubuntu 7.04 in VMware Fusion Beta with no problems. The only thing that was a small problem was installing the VMware Tools package, which I had to mess around with for a few minutes. Once those tools are installed, VMware really starts to shine. Fusion supports features such as file drag and drop between Mac OS and Ubuntu, clipboard synchronization, automatic cursor focus as you move in and out of the VMware window, and easy screen resolution resizing (it even works with the widescreen Macbook monitor). Fusion still needs some polish (like, seriously, those huge buttons at the top of the window are UGLY), but I’m sure VMware will work these things out before the final release this summer.
So far, I couldn’t be more happy with VMware Fusion, and highly recommend you download and try out the free beta evaluation (or buy it at Amazon
Here’s a screencast I put together to show some of the features of VMware Fusion running Ubuntu 7.04.
May 9th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
I can’t get tools to install…. how did you do it?
May 11th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
To install the VMware tools, you’ll need to make sure you don’t have another CD or CD image mounted. Then when trying to install the tools (Virtual Machine -> Install VMware Tools) a special VMware image should mount called “VMware Tools”. Inside this disc image, you’ll find two files, you want the one that ends with the .gz extension. Drag that to your desktop and extract it (right-click -> “Extract Here”). You’ll need to run script “vmware-install.pl” from the Ubuntu Terminal. Just navigate with Terminal to the “vmware-tools-distrib” directory and run the command “sudo ./vmware-install.pl”. It seems to work fine with all the defaults (just keep hitting Return to accept the defaults). It’s a little messy, that’s for sure, but it works. Hopefully, the VMWare team will find a way to make this install more automated under Ubuntu.
May 18th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
I went from Parallels to VMware and I am more than happy with the move.
Read more here: http://svenand.blogdrive.com/archive/56.html
August 8th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Hey there, i know you say option #1 is not for the faint of heart, but im able to back up my HD and i would like to try it. i am relatively a newbie when it comes to these things, but i have patience and determination. the problem is i can’t find any sort of instruction on this that is really in simple enough terms for me to do it. i was wondering if you had any advice or could point me in the direction of some sites on the matter. im really not interested in having some triple loader configuration or anything…
so far, i’ve loaded ubuntu through vmware and its had sound, but when i booted off the cd, i had no sound. i also had no use of my keyboard at the loading screen but once inside the system it worked fine. any advice you might give me would be greatly appreciated.
August 20th, 2007 at 6:38 am
I have my LED MBP triple booting with OSX, WinXP and Ubuntu 7.04. It’s not too difficult to set up. There are numerous wiki and faq articles, but one must be careful because much of the info is out-of-date. It really is much easier now. The only tricky part is the GRUB loader.
I, too, have installed VMWare and am happy with the overall performance. The only glitch was the need to re-validate my windows XP install since Windows detected significant hardware changes when booting the boot-camp partition as a virtual machine. Also, I’m looking for a way to run my Linux partition as a virtual machine without creating a duplicate/separate VMWare install.
August 21st, 2007 at 10:08 pm
i already have ubuntu on a separate parition of my macbook (just got it). i also can’t seem to read the ubuntu partition from mac os x. can i still run it in fusion?
August 26th, 2007 at 12:15 am
I am having troubles installing the tools. i followed your directions and in the terminal window it asks for a password when i run ’sudo ./vmware-install.pl’ i type my password but then it says command not found. i should just be typing my password that i use to log in, correct?
November 14th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Hey guys, if ask what are the requirements of partitioning the hard disk? cn any one answer me?
April 5th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Thanks for the lesson regarding installing the VMWare tools …Seems to work great!!