Upgrading Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 in a virtual machine

As you will know the next major long term release of Ubuntu is about to ship in 3 days time so I thought I would do a test upgrade to make sure all was working well and there were no real show stoppers. This is a controlled environment, so won't be exactly the same as a machine that has been in use for a while, but is none the less a good initial test. If it doesn't work here, then it is definitely not going to work on a machine that has been in use for a while.

So, I installed a 9.10 i386 desktop virtual machine , using Virtualbox 3.1.6 on an Ubuntu 9.10 host. See the pictures below. This has had the Virtualbox tools installed.



I then ran a complete update on the virtual machine to make sure the machine had the latest packages before starting the upgrade.

I then ran

update-manager -d

to start the upgrade process.





Once the process had completed, which took just over an hour with a very fast internet connection, I was able to selct to remove the now obsolete packages and complete the install.





I then re-installed the Virtualbox tools, as we now have a new kernel and the system was up and running without any issues and the Virtualbox tools were working as expected, see below.



So this does leave a really good feeling for all of my machine upgrades that will be taking place after the release of the final version on Thursday.

If you are new to operating system upgrades, then I can't recommend this process enough for making sure you are confident before doing it on your work machine.

Upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 64bit progressing nicely

Well, after deciding to move to a new 64bit implementation , I plugged in the USB pendrive with the live CD version of Ubuntu 9.10 beta installed, and booted.

I decided to change the disk lay out while I was at it, as the lappy was bought from Dell with Ubuntu installed, they had created an odd number of partitions, and I just set up the three:

/, /home and swap.

After selecting to use Ext4 I just pressed finish, and let the machine carry on with it's work. That was as hard as it got, and after clicking ok to reboot, I had the new machine with new OS ready to go.

The first impression was of speed to boot and get me to the desktop, and with the virtual images and USB sticks I have tested with, it was fast. It has to be the fastest booting OS I have ever installed, without a doubt. If I were to use a new flashy Intel SSD disk instead of my functional harddrive, I have no doubt this would be 5 seconds as has been reported around the web. As it is , I'm very happy with speed so I'm not running to the shops just yet. It is also worth mentioning that the speed of all the applications is noticeable, and I'm putting this down to it now being a native 64bit OS running on 64bit hardware , at last.

All the hardware was detected and correctly installed and I was able to download and install the Chromium browser wirelessly within minutes of the re-boot, and it is from there I'm posting now. The new Adobe 64bit flash plugin works with both Firefox 3.5 and Chromium 64bit, which I'm glad about as I had tested for this before hand.

One of the really nice things about using as many cloud applications as I do is that after the install, I'm immediately productive , with access to all my bookmarks, via Mozilla Weave and files via Dropbox and now Ubuntu one.

When you consider this is a beta, and there are going to be a few lumps and bumps, I can't praise the developers enough for producing such a good product, from the kernel developers right the way through the stack to Gnome. Linux in general has come an awful long way in the time I have been using it, and this has to be the best version I have installed to-date.

I have reported one bug I have found, which is to do with attaching an external monitor. It works fine unless you which to increase the resolution, and then it fails. This has been noted by several other people on different architectures, so it is not just a 64bit issue. You would never notice it unless you wished to use an external monitor at all, which I do unfortunately.

Well I'm a happy with the outcome so far, and look forward now to the final release. When I look back on this type of change in the distant past, the road sometimes had a sprinkling of tiny bombshells waiting for the novice, well not with this version.

Migrating my Dell laptop to Ubuntu 9.10 64bit

I have used 64bit Fedora before on a works workstation, but I haven't until now decide to move any of my personal workstations to a 64 bit operating system. Well , as always with these decisions, there have been a couple of events that make this move now easier, though I fully suspect I will hit the odd road bump on the way.

The three main announcements that have changed my mind are - Adobe have a 64bit version of the flash player available , and both Firefox and Chromium/Chrome are available in 64bit versions. I know there are some applications like Adobe Air that are stubbornly remaining 32bit for now, but you can work around this with 32bit libraries. This is not ideal, but I can live with it for now.

I have this morning burnt the beta to a USB pen drive to test the Dell XPS 1330, and all went well, with the wireless connecting instantly and I was browsing the web within seconds of the OS booting. I downloaded the 64bit version of the flash player and it worked with both Chromium and Firefox. The one thing I noticed was how rapid the system worked, considering it was working in Live mode from a USB pen drive. This could be a combination of the new version of Ubuntu and the native 64bit applications, but time will tell on that one.

I now have to back up all the "stuff" I have managed to collect in /home over the last couple of years , and then I will blow away the currently install OS and give Ubuntu 64bit the harddisk, and unless I hit any really major problems, I 'm going to stick with this as it really does seem silly to be running a 32bit OS on the latest 64bit hardware.

I will post again shortly after the upgrade and on any issues I hit on the road.

Turning on the new xsplash in Ubuntu 9.10

It is very easy to turn on, and here is how to do it.

sudo apt-get install xsplash

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-xsplash-artwork

Having read a lot of post's from the developers working on this, it is the base for the next generation of speedy start-ups, but in this release of Ubuntu will offer little externally over Usplash except a new design and different animation. It is what is happening underneath that is important for boot speeds in 10.04

I like the look of it anyway, and I hope thie theme/colour change is a sign of things to come with the potential late drop new artwork for the distro. We shall see.

Installing your Virtualbox drivers in the Ubuntu 9.10 alpha 6

While playing with Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 in a newly created virtual machine, I noticed that the normally easy install of the kernel drivers , well wasn't easy at all.

Basically with the version of virtua l box that I use - 3-0-3.6, the virtual drivers CD didn't appear on the desktop as normal. The iso file did appear on the config page, so virtualbox new that it had changed.

All you have to do is to mount the drive that is indicated on the bottom panel, which for my Dell M1330 , within the virtual machine was /dev/sr0.

Once this was mounted , the usual drivers could be downloaded and installed as normal, and the testing could commence.

Hope this saves you some time from hunting around to find out why the image doesn't auto mount.

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 is out today

I have been keeping an eye on the download page for the latest release of Ubuntu, as I always tend to upgrade my machines when the beta is released, and this Alpha release is the last development release before we get the Beta, as it will be almost completely feature complete.

I do however feel the Artwork team are keeping something up their sleeve for late inclusion, but I might be wrong on that one.

There is no doubt that the open source community is going to be having a busy time at the end of this year and the beginning of next, with Ubuntu 9.10, Chromium and potential some developer releases of Chrome OS. There are also lots of rumours about a moblin netbook being released at LinuxCon next week.

These are all developments that are truly ground breaking and original rather than the same old regurgitated OS that Microsoft will be trundling out in October as if it will offer anything remotely new and interesting.

Well the torrent file is downloaded and the iso is on it's way.

Hers the link

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 5 has a completely reworked install dialogue

If you have installed Linux over the years ,you will have noticed that the distros tend to fall into one of two camps, those with minimalist feedback when you press the install button, or those who offer news and detailed information about the Linux you are about to install. Well in this release Ubuntu have moved from the former camp into the latter camp, and here is the evidence.










The kernel has been moved up to 2.6.31-9 and there is a new Ibus application that I have not seen before, but will investigate.

It is still installing in a VirtualBox virtual machine while I type this, so I will report back on performance and any other new features I find.

A rather nice picture of the release schedule for Ubuntu 9.10

Time line for Ubuntu 9.10

Getting Ubuntu 9.10 running in Virtualbox

After downloading the latest iso this morning I decided to get it installed into a virtual machine and take a look.

Here are a couple of screen shots:

The first shows installing it into the virtual machine using the iso. I used 256 meg of Ram, a 4GB harddisk and bridged ethernet via my wireless card.



Once it was installed , I then installed the client tools from VirtualBox into the virtual machine.



Finally I installed the latest build of the Chromium browser into the virtual machine to test how that runs in the latest build. Instructions on how to get Chromium installed easily in Ubuntu look here on my blog.



It is running fine, and as it is using ext4 it is quick, even as a virtual image, and chromium also flies along to make the experience very pleasurable.

Latest Alpha 4 build of Ubuntu is now available

In the drive to the October release of the next version of Ubuntu, the community has released the latest Alpha build, version 4. The last release showed lots of new features, and this one should build on those advances, especially as it now includes Firefox 3.5.2 and a nice new disk utility called Palimpsest.

The kernel has been moved up to the latest release candidate from kernel.org, 2.6.31 RC5 and kernel mode has been enabled which should improve speeds on Intel graphics based , this will require testing on several of my laptops.

Get it here Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 and run it up in a virtual machine or a spare disk and give it a test, I know I will be ;-)

Installing Karmic Koala in VirtualPC - a great relief after Windows 7

After my fun and games with Windows 7 yesterday, I downloaded the latest alpha build of Ubuntu 9.10 - Karmic Koala - to have a look at the new and emerging features, but also just to check how this installed with VirtualPC v3.02, and was it quicker and any easier. The resounding answer is definitely yes. I just pointed the virtual CD/DVD drive to point to the downloaded iso image and started the virtual machine.

I booted into the live cd and had a look around first, no issues, everything just worked. I then clicked on the install icon, and six screens later clicked on install, must have taken me five minutes in total. The install to the virtual hard disk took another ten minutes including installing the tools and voila , I now have a fully functioning, fast booting OS to explore. What a difference to yesterdays downloading fest. and installing three applications to just stand still.

That is the big difference, after that 10 minutes, everything is installed and ready to go, the photo album manager, music player, browser, full office suite, photo editor, voip tool, IM tool, etc etc and the candle stick maker.

I have absolutely no doubt that if every user had to install Windows 7 from scratch and all their applications , people would love it a whole lot less, and it is one of the reasons that the pre-installed monopoly for Microsoft is such a bad thing for consumers and the computer industry.

I just hope that Larry Ellison of Oracle fame now throws his hat in the ring and does something interesting with open source on the desktop, along with Google, Debian, RedHat, Canonical, Novell and Apple. I think we can say for the first time since IBM and OS/2, Microsoft has some serious and large competition to it's monopoly. I hope everyone delivers on this potential, as the real winners will be all of us.

Playing with VMware workstation 7 beta

I have been using this on a Redhat 5.3 based workstation for several weeks now and it has proved in it's current build - 169612 to be very stable. I have run up several virtual images, which include a Redhat 5.2 image to test logical volume testing, and an Ubuntu 9.10 karmic image to have a look at how Grub v2 works with this next release. All have gone well, and there are many new features as you can see from the list below, which I have grabbed from the web.

The one point I would make , is if these are enough of an improvement on Workstation 6.52, as normally when Vmware ups the version number, they ask for some more money. We will have to wait and see for the announcement.

Anyway here is a list of what I have found on the new features.

* Improvements in the support of 3D
OpenGL 2.1 and Shader Model 3.0 are supported in virtual machines, Windows XP, Vista
and Windows 7.

* Support for new model drivers Windows Display Driver Model for Windows 7
is still only 2D acceleration and support only one monitor, the driver is using 32MB RAM.
If you want to run a 3d application in Windows 7, you must configure it to use the old SVGAII driver from VMware.

* Support vSphere 4.0 and ESX support
Professionals can now run these technologies as a guest system to verify the manner in which they are suited to your organization. ESX at this point is supported only on processors that support hardware-accelerated virtualization (all Intel Core 2 and above, AMD Athlon 64 X2 AM2/Phenom and above).

* Support for Multiple expanded to a four-SMP systems
VMware allows you to allocate to the guest system with four virtual single processor with two dual-and single-Quad.

* Virtual printer allows you to print without a printer to print on all printers host OS
Printers are added to the guest operating systems automatically and not require a network.

* Download VMware tools on the Internet on demand.

VMware added ability to upload via the internet the latest versions of VMware Tools including for the new OS, which will improve support for new systems of having to wait out a new version of VMware WorkStation.

* AutoProtect
Snapshot'ov possibility of creating a new virtual machine on a schedule for the rapid restoration of the guest OS.
* Encrypting the virtual machine
VMware now supports encryption (AES 128-bit) and password protection of virtual machines. Running such machines working in the VMware Player.

* Support for IPv6 was added to connect the type of bridge (direct connection of virtual machines to the physical network).

* Support for ALSA
Finally we became VMware support audio output to ALSA, which will simultaneously output sound from the host and guest OS without locking the sound device.

* Put on a break
Now you can temporarily stop the implementation of a guest operating system and free up resources for the system.

* Improvements in technology Drag and Drop.
Support drag and drop images, formatted e-mail attachments and zip folders is now supported in Windows, and Linux.

* Improved support for debugging of guest OSes in a replay ( "Play")

* Expanding virtual disks.
It is now possible to expand virtual disks and operating system Windows Vista and Windows 7 can take advantage of this opportunity without running additional software

* Fuse
Linux operating systems can now mount the virtual disk images via Fuse.