Day: November 1, 2009

See part 1 here:

Ubuntu Linux: Upgrade to 9.10 Karmic Koala Experience (Part 1)

After the upgrade finished, it rebooted.  Here’s my new login screen:

As you can see, it needs some work (things are overlapping in the bottom right).  It does look nice though and it now shows me the user account (or accounts?) that I can choose from, whereas before, I had to “know” the name of the user accounts.  In normal use, this isn’t a problem, but in a VM that I may not touch for months, I can easily forget the login name, especially in a VM that I didn’t build and didn’t create the name of the account.

I’ll have to figure out how to change the machine name eventually, as “ubuntu810desktop” is no longer an appropriate name, of course.

After I rebooted and logged in, there was a crash report icon in the upper right.  I clicked it and it asked for my password:

 

then this:

 

I was not aware of a crash.  I looked up “hap_lpadmin”.  This seems to be related to Python.  I do have Python 2.5 and 2.6 installed in this virtual appliance.  I clicked “Report Problem…”, then it went away, then another crash icon in the upper right and another PW prompt.

Oh!  Not looking good!

Interesting… I was not prompted for permission to install these and I don’t know what they are.

To continue with what?  I went ahead and registered and let the bug report complete and entered what little I know.  I also noticed, while typing an explanation into their web form, that my keyboard layout got hosed.  When I first downloaded this “Virtual Appliance” of Ubunuto 8.10 from the VMWare virtual appliances site, the keyboard layout was set for Afghanistan.  I changed it to use my Microsoft Internet keyboard and USA.  After the upgrade, it’s acting like an Afghan keyboard again (can’t type double or single quotes) but when I go to keyboard settings, it still shows my own settings.  It’s not using what it’s showing.

After submitting the report…

I don’t know how important it is to keep this bug report information private, but I went ahead and erased all identifying information from this image before I posted it here.

Rebooting now, to make sure everything comes up cleanly…

Ah Ha!  On the login screen, I noticed the keyboard is “USA (Alternative international (former us_intl))”.  This is not what the keyboard applet showed me before I rebooted.  I’ll change it now to just “USA” to see if that takes care of the problem.  Looking at the prior login screen capture, it too shows an international layout, which disagrees with what the keyboard applet showed after logging in.

The login in sequence does some butchering to the screen… showing 4 squished images of what it’s attempting to show, then cropping off all but the upper left quadrant.  Then it gets to the desktop OK.  It happened too fast for me to get a screen shot though.

OK, back into the desktop with no crashes and the keyboard seems to be behaving properly now.  Looks like the upgrade is finally complete.

VMWare is both a company and a product.  The company is named after their flagship product.  The product is virtual machine (VM) software.  They have several variations of it to choose from.  One is a program that runs under Windows (there’s also a Linux version and a Max OS X version).  This product allows you to create VMs by assigning virtual hardware to the VM by telling the VM how much memory it has, how many hard drives, what size they are, how many CPUs, etc…  You can then insert an O/S CD or DVD and have the VM boot from it and install that Operating system, whether it’s Windows, Linux, or any other Operating system that’s designed for Intel compatible hardware.

(Pictured Above:  VMWare hosted in Windows 7, running Ubuntu Linux inside the Virtual Machine.)

They also have a product they call the VMWare free player.  This is just like the previously mention product, except you can’t create new VMs with it or reconfigure existing VMs.  It’s a free download.

They provide a free server product, called a hypervisor.  And, they provide a VMWare product, that itself is an operating system.  It’s a variation of Linux and boots directly to the VMWare management software.  It’s a stripped down version of Linux so that you can devote most of your resources to your virtual machines.  It’s intended for use on powerful servers in large machine rooms in the back office in big corporations so that they can run multiple, virtual servers on fewer physical machines than they have virtual machines.  It also provides remote management so that the administrators don’t have to walk around to each physical server to maintain the virtual servers.  It can all be handled remotely.

On the Mac, VMWare provides a program called “Fusion” that lets you run any desktop OS in a window on the Mac.  So, you could boot to Mac OS X on your real Macintosh, then start up VMWare fusion, and boot up Windows XP inside of it, or Linux, or some other variation of Windows, or an old IBM OS/2 VM.

Competitors to VMWare are:

• Parallels
• XEN
• Virtual PC

As well as many others, but those are the big players.

A “Virtual Appliance” is a virtual machine (or “VM”) that has already had an Operating System installed and configured for a particular purpose.  For example, a VM may be set up to be an E-Mail server, or a DNS server, or a Web server, or a desktop environment for end user use.

VMWare, the leading VM software maker has multiple, pre-made “Virtual Appliances” that you can download, for free, from their website.  These are usually created and configured by their customers and shared with the community.  They’re an enormous time saver if you need a server and don’t have the time or the know-how to set one up from scratch.  Just download a pre-made one and go!

“Distro” is short for “Distribution”.  In the computer field, it usually refers to a particular variant of a piece of software.  The most common use of the term “distro” is referring to the many variations of the Linux Operating System.  There are dozens of different distributions of Linux.  A small handful are:

• Ubuntu
• Red Had
• TurboLinux
• Suse

Each one of these are provided by a different group or organization.  Each one is said to be a different “distro”.  As you can see, “Linux” is not a single operating system.  There are many flavors of it distributed by different groups.  No one company “owns” Linux.