Ubuntu 11.04 on VmWare Player with Windows 7 host

Previous: Ubuntu 11.04 on Virtualbox with Windows 7 host - FAIL

Despite the issues with Virtualbox, I still felt the VM approach was the way to go to run Ubuntu 11.04 with Windows 7 on the Dell Vostro. It seemed as if there was no free virtualization proram available that would do the job, so I went to the VmWare site expecting to pay around $80, as in years past. I didn't like the idea of having to pay just to use my personal system when on the road, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that VmWare now offers a product called VmWare Player that is available free for personal use. I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 on the Dell laptop using VmWare Player.

The installation went smoothly and it was easy to see what was going on at all times.

Just as with Virtualbox, VmWare Player "thought" the system lacked the hardware necessary to run Unity. I don't understand well enough how virtualization software works to have a guess as to why that might be. The "real" hardware is certainly adequate. Of course, for this limited purpose the classic Gnome desktop is perfectly adequate, too.

On edit: Found a solution from David Tam on his blog. It seems Unity depends on hardware 3D graphics acceleration, which is not supported in a guest VM. The solution is to switch to a 2D version of the Unity desktop:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unity-2d-team/unity-2d-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-2d-default-settings

then log out and in again. Voilá!

Network connectivity from the guest OS was seamless. I plugged a USB stick into a port, and VmWare Player connected it to the Ubuntu instance with no problem.

I shut down the Ubuntu guest from inside the guest, then double-clicked its entry in VmWare Player's list to restart it. All normal.

Good to go.

Next: GoogleEarth installation on Ubuntu 11.04

Ubuntu 11.04 on Virtualbox with Windows 7 host - FAIL

Previous: Windows 7 boot menu issues

With Ubuntu 11.04 running as a VirtualBox VM on a Microsoft Windows 7 host system, USB devices are not visible to the guest Ubuntu instance. Community documentation at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox/USB says, "Add yourself to the user group vboxusers, then log out and back in." I found no group named vboxusers, so I created one and added my own account, logged out and back in. This had absolutely no effect.

Another source at http://www.ubuntugeek.com/running-ubuntu-11-04-natty-unity-3d-on-virtualbox-4-x.html suggested installing "Virtualbox guest additions," and said to "click on Devices->Install guest additions," which I could not find anywhere, in any menu of any application on either the host or guest systems.

As a last resort, I looked at the Virtualbox user manual. On this page http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#idp11234128 it suggested the following procedure to install Virtualbox guest additions for Ubuntu:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install dkms

and then...oops...point to the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso file, which doesn't seem to exist anywhere at all. Searching further, I found a thread on Ubuntu Forums at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=584763 where people were looking for this file. This thread also recommends opening the "Devices" drop-down menu in Virtualbox, but there is no such menu item. A thread on the Virtualbox forums at http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7007 also recommends using this drop-down menu, which does not exist.

Finally, I found an answer at http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=38548. The Virtualbox menu bar in the guest window does not appear when running in "scale" mode. Used host-C to get out of "scale" mode, and the menu appeared. (I had switched to scale mode early on, since the Ubuntu screen image does not fit inside its Windows window, and resizing the Windows window had no effect on the size or aspect ratio of the Ubuntu screen.) The option to install the virtual guest additions resulted in an iso file appearing as an external CD-ROM drive in the guest Ubuntu instance.

At that point, I ran the update and upgrade and installed dkms. Upgrade did quite a lot and took several minutes to run.

After following the instructions at http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#idp11234128, the guest OS still did not see the USB drive. Virtualbox reported the error, "USB device ' ' with UUID {blah} is busy with a previous request. Please try again later," and under Details it gave the result code E_INVALIDARG (0x80070057) for component HostUSBDevice and interface IHostUSBDevice.

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