Monthly Archives: June 2006

The Hamsters Have Landed!

The Geograph Tower of Power!The new servers for Geograph arrived this morning, behold the almighty Tower of Power!

The supplier for this lot was World of Computers and they’ve been very helpful in my dealings with them. They were recommended to me and so far they’ve been great. They even deliver the stuff themselves in their own van. I like that. It might cost them a bit more, but they can be sure it’s taken care of in transit and is received by the right person. Nice 🙂

Geograph is a spare time project and I’m on an absolutely monster schedule for the next few weeks to launch a new product, so it could be several weeks before we get these babies racked up. I’ll write more about the architecture of the new setup as I do it…

Installing VMWare Server Beta on Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake

Edit: There’s now a more thorough guide over at HowToForge

I started with a server install of Ubuntu, and to install VMWare server you need a desktop, a compiler, kernel headers and a few other odds and ends

Easy way to get a desktop is go the whole hog and a give a home to a Gnome…

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Reboot and experience Ubuntu in all its brown chocolately glory. Next you need some build tools, none of this stuff comes by default, so go get it..

sudo apt-get install build-essential

The install wants inetd or xinetd, I went with xinetd…

sudo apt-get install xinetd

Now get your kernel version with uname

uname -a
Linux hostname 2.6.15-23-server ...

Use that info to fetch the kernel headers you need

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.15-23-server

I found it useful to go and symlink the headers to the place the VMWare installer expects to find them

cd /usr/src/
sudo ln -s linux-headers-2.6.15-23-server linux

Now you are ready to install VMWare Server. Grab the Linux tarball from the VMWare site, unpack it, and run the installer

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

You should be able to accept the defaults for most questions unless you have specific virtual machine networking needs. Once installed, start the VMWare console from the Applications -> System Tools menu.

Easy!