James Little

It seems there’s some mixed information about whether the wireless chip in this model works out-of-the-box with Ubuntu. I’ve tested with Karmic and the Lucid Beta (Netbook Remix versions) and for me it didn’t work. The chip in my model is the Atheros AR2427, which although not a new chip, seems to have an an unfamiliar hardware device ID of 002c, and so is not picked up by the ath9k wifi driver found in the kernel. The driver has been patched by the Linux Wireless developers but this patch has not worked its way into a kernel release yet, so the solution is to compile and install the latest bleeding edge wireless drivers, which is actually a pretty painless operation. It’s also a very safe operation, because the installer leaves the original kernel drivers intact and provides an uninstall script; but I have not needed to revert.

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If you’ve recently bought a laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, the chances are it’s running on the Santa Rosa platform. Having wiped off the unfortunate Windows installation, you’ll want to install some flavour of linux, such as Ubuntu Feisty. Unfortunately the installation process is not as smooth as you might as expect. In fact, it prooved so troublesome for me that in the end I decided that upgrading to Gutsy would be a better idea. But first I’ll talk you through how you can go about getting Feisty installed:

When booting from the Feisty Live CD, the first problem you’ll encounter will probably be something like:
/bin/sh: can't access tty: job control turned off
(initramfs)

and the OS will not continue to load. I’m not sure on the cause of this, but to get round it hit F6 at the boot menu and append break=top to the list of options. You should then see a slightly different error message, and underneath it you should type:
modprobe piix
exit

The LiveCD should then continue to load the OS. After a minute or so you’ll probably see a lovely blue screen with a “Failed to start the X server…” error message. Hit Yes or No (whatever you fancy) and you’ll be dumped at the command line where you should type:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Remember the sudo bit or you’ll be reminded that you are not a superuser; no password is required. The Xorg configuration screen will appear and you’ll be asked (a lot) of questions. Keep the driver on “vesa” and continue through the questions, providing the default answers. At the bit where it asks you something about monitor config options and gives you the choice of “Simple”, “Medium” and “Advanced” I hit Medium and continued through. The vesa driver might not support your resolution if you have a widescreen aspect ratio (1280×800, 1440×900, etc.). Don’t worry about this for now and continue. Eventually you’ll be dumped back to the command line. Now type:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart
and the Gnome desktop environment should start to load. From here you can perform your installation as required.

When you boot Feisty for the first time you’ll notice some more problems, such as the lack of an Intel graphics driver if your laptop uses the onboard Intel GMA965 chip, and non-functional sound & wireless. For me it was the lack of graphics driver that prompted me to upgrade to Gutsy, since the solution for Feisty involved upgrading the kernel to 2.6.22 anyway, which is the kernel version used in Gutsy (see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494943 for more info). At the time of writing, Gutsy Tribe 5 has just been released and it seems to be stable. You can save yourself a lot of hassle where Santa Rosa is concerned by downloading the tribe 5 live CD which boots with no problems whatsoever for me, including desktop effects, wireless (my laptop has the 4965AGN chip) and sound. If you’ve already installed feisty you can upgrade to Gutsy by running “update-manager -d”.

So suddenly I see “No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found.” instead of the usual volume control tool in Feisty. I googled the problem and most of the solutions hinged around the system not detecting the soundcard, or the user forgetting that they didn’t have one =) But my sound had been working fine for a few months, so it had to be something else. In this case, careless use of the ‘usermod’ command; I used the command ‘usermod -G groupname’ to add my user to a group I had just created. Unfortunately it removed me from every other group, including the ‘audio’ group.

A quick gedit of /etc/group and I was back in business. The moral of the story: if your sound suddenly stops working, check that your user is still a member of the audio group. Oh, and use ‘usermod’ more carefully than I did.

Unfortunaltely the latest kernel included in Gutsy (2.6.22-10) isn’t supported by VMware yet, so you’ll run into a few problems when attempting to install VMware Server. If you’re running 64bit Gutsy and you haven’t already installed the ia32 libraries then you’ll probably see this message to start with:
The correct version of one or more libraries needed to run VMware Server may be missing. This is the output of ldd /usr/bin/vmware:
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libm.so.6 => /lib32/libm.so.6 (0xf7f93000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib32/libdl.so.2 (0xf7f8f000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib32/libpthread.so.0 (0xf7f76000)
libX11.so.6 => not found
libXtst.so.6 => not found
libXext.so.6 => not found
libXt.so.6 => not found
libICE.so.6 => not found
libSM.so.6 => not found
libXrender.so.1 => not found
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libz.so.1 (0xf7f60000)
libc.so.6 => /lib32/libc.so.6 (0xf7e16000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7fc6000)

This program cannot tell for sure, but you may need to upgrade libc5 to glibc
before you can run VMware Server.

which is easily remedied by running:
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

The next error message occurs when the vmware-config script attempts to build the vmmon modules:

None of the pre-built vmmon modules for VMware Server is suitable for your
running kernel. Do you want this program to try to build the vmmon module for
your system (you need to have a C compiler installed on your system)? [yes]

Using compiler "/usr/bin/gcc". Use environment variable CC to override.

What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running
kernel? [/lib/modules/2.6.22-10-generic/build/include]

Extracting the sources of the vmmon module.

Building the vmmon module.

Using 2.6.x kernel build system.
make: Entering directory `/tmp/vmware-config1/vmmon-only'
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.22-10-generic/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.22-10-generic'
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config1/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config1/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:80:
/tmp/vmware-config1/vmmon-only/./include/compat_kernel.h:21: error: expected declaration specifiers or ‘...’ before ‘compat_exit’
/tmp/vmware-config1/vmmon-only/./include/compat_kernel.h:21: error: expected declaration specifiers or ‘...’ before ‘exit_code’
/tmp/vmware-config1/vmmon-only/./include/compat_kernel.h:21: warning: type defaults to ‘int’ in declaration of ‘_syscall1’
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config1/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config1/vmmon-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.22-10-generic'
make: *** [vmmon.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config1/vmmon-only'
Unable to build the vmmon module.

For more information on how to troubleshoot module-related problems, please
visit our Web site at "http://www.vmware.com/download/modules/modules.html" and
"http://www.vmware.com/support/reference/linux/prebuilt_modules_linux.html".

Execution aborted.

To get around this we need to apply a patch called vmware-any-any (see here for more info). I used version 113 as it seems to be the latest; it can be downloaded here. Extract the contents of the archive, navigate to their location and simply run:
./runme.pl
to install the patch. You’ll see the following:
Updating /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl ... now patched
Updating /usr/bin/vmware ... No patch needed/available
Updating /usr/bin/vmnet-bridge ... No patch needed/available
Updating /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx ... No patch needed/available
Updating /usr/lib/vmware/bin-debug/vmware-vmx ... No patch needed/available
VMware modules in "/usr/lib/vmware/modules/source" has been updated.

Before running VMware for the first time after update, you need to configure it
for your running kernel by invoking the following command:
"/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl". Do you want this script to invoke the command for
you now? [yes]

Hit enter to invoke vmware-config.pl and the rest of the installation should now run smoothly. Note that you will need a C++ compiler to build the vmmon modules. Enter the following to install such development tools:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-'uname -r'

The final message you should see is:
The configuration of VMware Server 1.0.3 build-44356 for Linux for this running kernel completed successfully.

and you should now have a fully-functional version of VMWare Server; launch it by typing ‘vmware’ at the command line, or from the menu entry.