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Nexenta (also called GNU/OpenSolaris) is a blend of OpenSolaris, GNU, and Debian (Ubuntu, specifically).  It’s pretty cool, actually—blending the OpenSolaris kernel with Ubuntu userland binaries to create something that’s not quite Solaris and not quite Linux, but has some of the values of both.  For those of you interested in running it on VMware ESX Server, I’m happy to report that it does work just fine.

To install Nexenta as a VM in ESX, I used the following settings:

• 512 MB of RAM
• 4GB virtual disk (pre-allocated); obviously, you would want more space if wanted to do anything useful with Nexenta
• LSI Logic SCSI controller
• “Flexible” network adapter

The installation went very smoothly and very quickly (quicker than Solaris 10 and a couple of the other Linux distributions I’ve tried on ESX).  The system came up very smoothly and was immediately accessible across the network.  I didn’t try anything useful or meaningful with it; it is an alpha version, after all.

It’s worth keeping an eye on, at least.  I’ll be interested to see how it develops.

Once I’d gotten Ubuntu up and running on my HP nc8230 laptop, the next order of business was—due to business needs—get a copy of Windows XP Professional running under VMware Workstation on Ubuntu.  While I’m not a huge Windows fan (I prefer Mac OS X and Linux to Windows, generally), I also recognize the need for Windows in a world where your customers all run Windows.

I’d never installed VMware Workstation on a Linux host before, so this would be a new experience for me.  It couldn’t be that hard, right?  Well, it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped it would be, that’s for sure.

In order to get VMware Workstation 5.5.1 to install on Ubuntu 5.10, here’s what I had to do:

1. Copy the VMware Workstation 5.5.1 software onto the machine.
2. Using apt-get, install gcc, g++, and the appropriate Linux headers.
3. Untar the VMware Workstation software and run the installation script.  When prompted, go ahead and compile a custom vmmon module.

That should do it.  One site I found while preparing for this also suggested installing the “build-essential” package, but I didn’t install this and VMware Workstation seems to run just fine.

Coming up soon:  installation of Solaris x86 under VMware Workstation running on Ubuntu Linux!

I was issued a new HP Compaq nc8230 laptop today, with the standard corporate image of Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 and the assorted applications.  One of the very first things I did was install Ubuntu 5.10.  Here’s some additional information on a few of the hurdles involved (there aren’t many, fortunately).

I was already familiar with Ubuntu 5.10, having already installed it for my daughters on two older Compaq laptops.  However, I’d never installed it on brand-new equipment, so I was a bit concerned that all the hardware wouldn’t be detected properly.  A bit of searching came up with this article indicating that Ubuntu 5.04 had installed succesfully, so I felt fairly confident that everything would be fine.

So I popped in the Ubuntu installation CD, pressed Enter when prompted, and was soon greeted with a blank screen.  That was odd.  I rebooted, and got the same behavior.  Upon the next reboot, I pressed F1 at the “boot:” prompt to review some parameters.  I quickly stumbled onto the “vga=771” parameter.  At the boot prompt, I used “linux vga=771” and the system booted into the installation menu.  My first hurdle was overcome.

The rest of the installation seemed to go smoothly, right up until the point where the installation crashed with a message that it couldn’t copy files from the CD-ROM.  In fact, it couldn’t detect that the CD-ROM drive even existed.

I rebooted, tried again, got a little bit farther, and got the same message again.  Examining the CD a bit closer, I didn’t see anything wrong with the disc (no obvious scratches, dirt, smudges, etc.), but cleaned the CD nevertheless and tried again.  This time the installation process was successful, and everything was golden.

Until the X Server didn’t work on the final reboot.  Sigh.  Referring back to this article I’d found earlier, I followed the instructions to remove (if possible) and reinstall the xorg-driver-fglrx package and then reconfigure X.  When I had finally completed those steps, the X Window System started up and dropped me onto a customized GNOME desktop.  Finally!

From there, I proceeded to install a 686 kernel (instead of the generic 386 kernel) and run an “apt-get upgrade” to pick up the latest packages from the Ubuntu repositories.  So far (knock on wood), everything has been pretty stable and pretty functional.

UPDATE:  Scratch that functional part.  The laptop has locked up more times in one afternoon than my PowerBook has in the 2+ years that I’ve owned it.  I’m not really sure what’s going on with this thing, but clearly something isn’t quite right.

A few days ago I mentioned Kubuntu 5.10.  Kubuntu is the KDE-based variant of Ubuntu.  After having installed and used Kubuntu, I decided to try Ubuntu, the GNOME-based cousin.  I downloaded the ISO image of the install CD last night and installed it today while reviewing HSRP configurations for an upcoming Cisco installation.

I am equally as pleased with Ubuntu as with Kubuntu.  I find that version 2.12 of GNOME, which ships with Ubuntu, is much better than the older versions of GNOME that I had used.  In addition, the overall fit and finish of the distribution is very good, and I continue to enjoy using apt-get to update and upgrade packages on the system.  As a matter of fact, the only downside to either distribution so far is that Kubuntu doesn’t include Firefox by default (note that Firefox is included with Ubuntu).

So, I currently have two older Compaq Armada E500 laptops that I’ve loaded with Linux—one is running Kubuntu, and the other is running Ubuntu.  Both work flawlessly, including full interoperability with my wireless network.

Kubuntu 5.10, the KDE-based variant of Ubuntu, normally comes with KDE 3.4.3.  With KDE 3.5.0 just recently released, however, I wanted to update Kubuntu to use the latest version of KDE.  Here’s what I had to do to make it work.

First, from this page, I downloaded and added the appropriate GPG key.  Once that was done, I used “apt-get update” to download the latest package information and “apt-get upgrade” to upgrade packages.  That upgraded most of KDE, but there were a few packages that still refused to upgrade (they were reported by apt-get as “held back”).

After poking around with apt-get for a while, I discovered that there was one missing file—libgnokii2—that couldn’t be found in the apt-get sources.  I manually reviewed the apt-get sources and finally found this package in the universe section of the main Ubuntu apt-get source.  I edited /etc/apt/sources.list to enable the other sections, then manually installed the missing file with these commands:

apt-get clean
apt-get update
apt-get install libgnokii2

I then edited /etc/apt/sources.list again to disable the other sources and upgraded the remainder of the KDE packages:

apt-get clean
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

This last round of apt-get removed a few obsolete packages and then updated the remainder of the KDE packages.

I don’t know if this is the “correct” way of doing things, but it seemed to be the only way to make it work as anticipated.  If anyone has a better way, please let me know.

After wrestling with installing, configuring, and supporting Fedora Core 3 on an older Compaq Armada E500 laptop, I decided to break with my Red Hat/Fedora legacy and try Kubuntu, the KDE-based Ubuntu variation.  Ubuntu itself is a relative newcomer to the Linux distribution arena, based on (as I understand it) Debian.

In previous stints using Linux as my desktop OS, I’d always been partial to KDE instead of GNOME.  Some would say that it’s because KDE has traditionally been more “Windows-like” than the other Linux graphical environments; perhaps that’s the case.  I’ve typically found KDE easier to work with, and since this laptop would eventually be used by the kids I felt like ease of use was important.

The install went very quickly and very smoothly.  When the install was done, I then proceeded to update KDE to version 3.5.0 (which had just been released a few days before).  Along the way, I learned a handy piece of information about HTTP proxies and command-line utilities (I’ll soon post information on that as well).  Eventually, I managed to get apt-get to download and install the updated KDE 3.5 packages.  I rebooted the system and found that I was now running the updated version of KDE.  (Side note:  There are still some KDE packages that won’t upgrade for some reason; I’m currently working on resolving that issue.)

It’s still too early to tell for certain, but I may just have found a new desktop Linux version.