Ubuntu Tutorials

UPDATE: This post has been updated for VMware Server 1.0.5 on Ubuntu 8.04.  If you are running Ubuntu 8.04 you’ll need to follow those instructions.

My previous tutorial on installing VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.10 has been wildly successful but I also realize now that it has become a bit out of date. This tutorial is an update with a few simplified steps. It will be nice when VMware Server makes it into canonicals partner repository (as is available on Ubuntu 7.04), but until then these few steps should work for most of us.

As an update from the previous post, for those that are curious, here is an explanation. At the time of that writing there was a slight issue with the current kernel that required the suggested patch. Since that post was published the kernel has been updated and the patch no longer needed. It doesn’t appear to conflict with anything if it is run with the patch, but I felt that this warranted an updated tutorial.

Installing VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”

1. Download VMware Server from the VMware website.
2. Unpack the contents of the archive to your system (perhaps /tmp)
3. sudo aptitude install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-$(uname -r)
   
4. Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), cd /tmp/vmware-server (or wherever you unpacked the archive)
5. sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Answer all of the questions presented to you. The defaults should be fine if you are unsure about any. When everything has finished you should be able to launch VMware Server from your desktop menu under Applications > System Tools.

The last step in the installer should ask you for your VMware Server serial number. While VMware Server is free (free as in beer) it does require a serial number to use and is not free software (free as in freedom). If you need a serial number generated you can register for your VMware Server serial number(s) here.

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I spent the day teaching a class on Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 and in doing so got in the habit of using some Redhat specific commands. After class when I got back on my Ubuntu laptop I attempted to restart a service using “service network restart”. Instead of complaining about the service command not being found it instructed me that if I wanted that tool I would need to install the sysvconfig.

If you’re familiar with the Redat tool, service, and would like that functionality on Ubuntu simply do the following:

sudo aptitude install sysvconfig

Once this package is installed you can then start, stop or restart services on your machine using commands like:

sudo service apache2 restart
sudo service ntpd stop
sudo service network restart

As far as I understand this is equivalent to running:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If anyone knows any other differences between ‘service’ and ‘/etc/init.d/’ I’d be interested in hearing about them. Enjoy.

As has been seen on many other blogs this morning the Give One, Get One program for the One Laptop Per Child program began today.  This is a limited offering within the US and Canada as I understand where donating $399 to the program gives one of the laptops to a child in a developing nation and also delivers one for the child in your life (I’m sure in many cases that would be you!).  I want to also mention my support for the program today and that I have submitted my donation.

I think this is a really good program and a good price for two machines ($200 of which is tax deductable).  If you are able to donate you might want to head over there soon, the program only lasts for 15 days (ending Nov 26th, 2007)!

From the confirmation page:

Thank you for participating in Give One Get One. Your donation will bring education and enlightenment to children of the developing world, and, in recognition of your gift, you will be receiving an XO laptop for the child in your life as well. If you have any questions or problems, please contact One Laptop Per Child at service@laptopgiving.org. Should your employer wish to match your donation, we are a 501(c)(3) organization and our EIN# is 20-5471780. Thanks again, and welcome to the One Laptop Per Child community!

The Ubuntu Utah Team participated in the Utah Multi-Distro Release Party today. We heard presentations from the three major distributions that have had a release within the last month. Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”, Fedora 8 “Werewolf” and openSUSE 10.3. We also heard a presentation from some of the local OSX nerds. I’ll give it to OSX for building some very intuitive graphical interfaces, but this didn’t get too much focus as it is non-free of course.

We had a great response from the community today and I was glad to be able to help represent Ubuntu at the event. We handed out CDs, Ubuntu stickers and helped quite a few people install and upgrade. It’s good to see the Free Software community grow, even if we are using different distributions. I will note, however, that in the spirit of Ubuntu I did have to point out that we should all better get along. Until my quick presentation and a reminder of the Ubuntu spirit there was a lot of “this distro sucks”, and “that distro sucks”. I am really glad to be part of a distribution that can try to remember to get along. It’s not about teams here guys, we’re all about Free Software, and should remember that.

Congratulations to the Fedora team and the openSUSE team for greatly improved releases. I will be tinkering with these two releases within VirtualBox for a while.

I realize I have been a bit lax on the tutorials this week and I promise to pick up again really soon.  The week after UDS required a bit of catch up time on other things, and it didn’t help that I’m also on the road for work this week.  I’ll get back to it just as soon as I can.

I find myself today sitting in the Dallas/Ft Worth Airport in Texas waiting for my flight.  I had a few hours to kill so I picked up a copy of Time magazine to help pass the time.  (The one with the iPhone on the cover).  I was surprised to see an advertisement inside for the One Laptop Per Child project and the “Give 1, Get 1” promotion.

Between November 12th and November 26th you can order two of the OLPC machines, one for yourself and one to be donated to a child in a developing nation for $399.

I’m tempted to do this for a few reasons:

1. I hear good things about the OLPC project and it seems to be beneficial to children in developing nations.
2. It runs Linux (a variation of Fedora as I understand?)
3. I would also like one of these machines to tinker with and help promote by displaying.

I’d be interested in the communites opinion on these machines.  What have you heard?  Do you think they are actual of benefit as a donation?  If you have an OLPC machine can you tell me much about it?  I appreciate your feedback on this.

So I’ve spent the last week in Dallas teaching a Linux system admin course.  Part of my job while I’m here is to give an exam on the last day of the course.  This requires me to print a few pages for the candidates regarding the exam.  Well, I forgot to do it while I was at the office so I when I got back to the hotel I figured I’d do it there.  That is where I was confronted again with the Windows XP machine…

I knew I’d most likely be printing this from a Windows machine so I had put the .pdf files on a small USB drive fomatted to msdos filesystem.  I figure I could just plug it in to the XP machine, click print and go.  Well… I guess I’m so used to Ubuntu that I’m giving Windows XP too much credit.  Here’s how it really went down.

I connect the USB drive and it takes a full minute for it to recognize, load and let me access the drive.  Connecting the same drive to an Ubuntu machine is under five seconds.  Note that Ubuntu even quickly recognizes the drive despite it not being a native Linux filesystem type.

I navigate my way to the file browser and find the removable disk.  I notice that it isn’t recognizing the .pdf file, but instead is suggesting I open it with Internet Exploder.  Ok, let’s try “open with”… no, Adobe pdf viewer (or anything compatible) is not found.  I guess I’ll try to go download Adobe Reader.  A 22M self-expanding .exe download later (for a simple .pdf viewer?  Are you kidding me!) I try to install it.  Nope, can’t do that either because I’m not admin on the machine.  Ok, this is going to get interesting.

So, I find one of the hotel employees and ask them if they could help me install Adobe.  They look at me like I’m a moron and honestly told me to “just open it with Microsoft Word”.  Uhh.. ok, nevermind.  They also said that the printer “only works sometimes” and that I might want to “go to the library to print things instead”.

Finally I simply asked if I could just connect the printer to my laptop and print from there.  They didn’t care.  Yeah, these hotel employees are top-notch!

Let’s retry this the “right” way.

I connect the USB device to my laptop.  Detected, mounted and opened for viewing in under five seconds.  I double click the icon and its opened in Evince.  Ok, that was much less work to get the document ready.  Now let’s try the printer.

I connect the printer via USB and wait a minute.  Perhaps thirty seconds later the printer is detected, installed and configured.  The desktop tells me “Printer X is now configured and ready to use”.  Cool.  system-config-printer should be renamed to zero-config-printer because that is how much work it took to set it up!

I then click print in Evince and out comes the document.  Done.  You know, people still insist on telling me that they don’t want to run Linux because its harder, or that Windows XP just works for what they want to do.  Are you kidding me?  Just this evening it took me twice as much work to *try* and print something, which never worked.  Ubuntu “just worked”… go figure.

Quick-connect options for network shares inside gnome can be even easier than using the Places > Connect to Server options. You can also quick-connect to these using the ALT-F2 run dialog. As far as I understand these are interchangable in their features, its just another more flexible way for you to connect to a remote machine or network share.  I’ve tested quite a few of these below and they seem to work just fine.  Are there any others that I have missed?  Here are some examples:

ALT-F2: "ssh://user@host"

ALT-F2: "ssh://user@host:/some/folder"

These will connect and open up nautilus with the contents of that network share. They also work for samba, for the Windows people.

ALT-F2: "smb://servername"

Or if you’d prefer FTP or the more securet SFTP.

ALT-F2: "ftp://hostname"

ALT-F2: "sftp://user@servername:port

…it even supports HTTP(S).

ALT-F2: "http://google.com"

I don’t think loading network connections can get much faster than that. Enjoy. Thanks goes to the Ubuntu Colorado list and David for pointing this out.

So as many of you know I recently got back from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston where we hashed out the details for the upcoming 8.04 release. It was loads of fun, I met a lot of cool people and I’m excited to get a lot of work done between now and then. In the meantime I thought I’d share something with you all that I noticed while I was there. Nobody seemed to use Firefox.

Nearly everyone at the conference was using Epiphany browser on the Gnome desktop. When asked why the two most common responses I got were:

1. Its faster.
2. Firefox is non-free.

While both of these are technically true this takes us back to the best part of Free Software, which is choice. If you’d like to try out the Epiphany browser (which I have been using pretty strictly since) follow these steps:

Installing Epiphany Browser

Installing Epiphany can be done a few ways, depending on your preference. I’ll outline a few ways that I can think of off the top of my head.

1. sudo aptitude install epiphany-browser
2. Applications > Add / Remove > Search “epiphany” > check-box > Apply

The Epiphany browser is based on the Gecko 1.8 engine and it does appear to render web pages very quickly. It is easy to use, simple, and just does what its supposed to do–render web pages. Nothing fancy other than what you just need. It does support extensions like seahorse for encryption, del.icio.us connections, greasemonkey and more, but it doesn’t feel like you need to rely on any of these (I haven’t even been using any).

I’m interested in your thoughts on Epiphany vs Firefox. Like it? Love it? Hate it? Why do you use one over the other?

I’m home from the Ubuntu Developer Summit (Boston 2007) and wanted to get a few of my thoughts out on virtual paper while they are still fresh. We have gone over so much information this week that I feel a bit of information overload, but it has been well worth it and a *lot* has been done. Just a few of the things that I’ve been able to accomplish while I’ve been here:

• the ‘ping’ tool will be added to the base alternate installer busybox shell (bug #159376).
• the ubuntu-hardened list, launchpad page and IRC channel have been resurrected.
• keybinding bugs have been fixed in Kubuntu for the macbook (brightness and eject) – Thanks Riddell
• improved bug working guidelines for the community (to be blogged about)
• improved working relationships with the motu and wiki teams (to be blogged about)
• submitted a sprint for improved automated installation tools and documentation
• discussed default ubuntu firewall options and tools
• discussed SELinux implementation options for pro-active security
• creation of the ubuntu community enterprise spec on launchpad for improved enterprise support

I’m really glad I was able to make the Summit this year and I only hope that I got enough work done that I can be considered for a Summit again in the future.  I do have the groundwork of plans for an education-for-implementation schedule within US Teams, but I’ll blog about that later..  Great work everyone.  It was great to meet all of you there and I hope to see you again next time!