Ubuntu desktop and ubuntu one for the cloud are very interesting products. Naturally one may be a little hesitant to load up Linux on your clean Windows 7 64 bit OS but may not know where to start. Hopefully this is where we can help. You essentially have two options to start with as a virtual platform to host Ubuntu. (1) Windows Virtual PC or (2) VMware and its many different options for consumers and businesses alike. For this specific test, we are going to load up Ubuntu 11.04 on our handy VMWare Player but before you can start, make sure you go to ubuntu.com and download the ISO which is approximately 685 MB in size.
- With the Ubuntu 11.04 iso downloaded and VMware Player running lets first start by clicking on ‘Create a New Virtual Machine’. For this test we have saved ubuntu-11.04-desktop-i386.iso to our SSD drive to make the user experience even better. When you are ready and set your iso path in place, go ahead and click ‘Next’ to continue.
- you will next be prompted to configure the ‘Easy Install Information’. Simply fill in the necessary information for ‘Full name’, ‘user name’, and ‘password’ and click on next to continue.
- You will see we going to save the Virtual Machine to our SSD drive. After selecting your location, click on next to continue. Make sure you have enough room on your drive to not only install Ubuntu, but to add any additional applications as needed.
- You will now be prompted to specify disk capacity for your configuration. You can change this at any time but for this instance, we have selected to allow for 6 gb as the maximum disk size. click on ‘next’ when you are ready to proceed.
- Now the only thing left to do is review the information you have selected. If everything is okay, click on finish to proceed and power on the newly created virtual machine.
- Hopefully everything worked out fine. If it did you will see a purple screen. Welcome to Ubuntu 11.04.
- as your drive is formatted, you will see several different slides detailing some of the features of this build. Some of the new enhancements/features include
- Ubuntu one
- Banshee Music Player with connections to Ubuntu One Music Store (kind of like itunes)
- Empathy IM and Evolution Mail. Empathy connects you all of your messaging accounts)
- Twitter, identi.ca, and facebook are all embedded into the new ubuntu menu system [messaging menu].
- After the first or second intital reboot and after the first bank of software configuation is complete, you will be asked by the VMware Easy Install boot loader to enter the credentials you specified earlier.
- Make sure you don’t wait to long because easy install will eventually time out.
- Chances are, if you are using a vm. You will receive a message indicating you do not have the hardware required to run unity. Click on OK to proceed.
- Next, lets make sure VMware tools is properly configured. Click on ‘Virtual Machine’ then click on ‘Install VMware tools installation’ to mount the virtual cd drive.
- Now double click on VMwareTools-8.4.6*.tar.gz to start the archive manager and uncompress. Click on ‘Extract’ to expand the installer.
- Now navigate to the location where you installed the tools and double-click on vmware-install.pl. At the prompt click on either display or run in terminal.
- All set! poke around and have fun. Remember you cant do any significant damage. If you do remember you can just delete the vm and create a new VM!
Enjoy friends!!!
