My server , Janus, was running the 64bit version of Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS. After my article of VMWare on Ubuntu server, I read that it is actually available for Ubuntu 7.04 in a repository. Great! So, what do we do, we upgrade to feisty. Well I have heard of a few horror stories of jumping over 2 versions with apt-get. Even with dis-upgrade. Still I didn’t listen and it all bombed out at me throwing nice exceptions and perl errors at me and installing half way. It was a good way to start the evening, trust me.

So, I re-installed 6.06 and tried the old fashion way. The following steps is all you need to do to get a clean upgrade and a fully working VMWare server later on WITHOUT loosing your virtual machines or your settings.

There are 3 parts to this procedure: 1, upgrading to Edgy 2, upgrading to feisty and 3, verifying and installing left over packages.

NOTE: my situation was a 64bit system therefor parts of this will not apply to 32bit systems and are clearly marked.

Part 1:Upgrade to Edgy Eft

Edgy was the next version of Dapper and upgrading isn’t really a big deal. Personally I use nano to edit files so the commands here are nano oriented.

First edit the apt source file. To do so type:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and in nano use the following key combinations: hit CTRL + W and then CTRL + R , this goes into search and replace mode. then type dapper to specify the word you are searching and hit enter. Next type edgy as the word you are replacing dapper with and hit enter again. You will notice all instances of dapper have been replaced with edgy. hit CTRL+X to exit and Y to accept the changes. Good stuff, now at the command line type:

sudo apt-get update

and when it is done

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

This will take a little bit of time. You will be asked if you want to upgrade and continue and that some packages will be downloaded. On a 24mbit link the whole download took just under 3 minutes with an average speed of just 700KB/s. Once it is done upgrading it will ask you to reboot and you should do so. Wait for a while until the server is booted again and log in again via SSH.

Part 1 complete!

Part 2: Updating to Feisty

You are done with edgy but you do not want to configure and re-check it. Since you want to move to Feisty ,you need to do the exact same thing with sources.list and replace edgy with feisty but do NOT do the dist-upgrade afterwards. After you have updated the repositories install instead the upgrade manager with

 sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

, and when it is done run it:

sudo do-release-upgrade

Notice: if you try to do this straight from dapper, your system will bomb out eventually and you end up with half the packages installed and half not.

You need to follow some instructions and even though it warns you about running this over ssh, it works perfectly!

Part 3: Install the missing parts and VMWare server

Now, after Feisty Fawn is installed, which involves another few minutes of downloading, it will reboot and you should be set with a nice new running system. The problem: in the 64 bit world the updater removed some packages necessary for VMWare and other things.

These can be re-added by typing:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs <--THIS IS FOR 64BIT ONLY

This will install all the necessary dependencies and the compatibility libs. And now comes the cool part. You can add a repository and install “commercial” software through Feisty, namely VMWare server complete with 64bit support.

add the following line at the bottom of your sources.list file:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu feisty-commercial main

and save it. Then do the sudo apt-get update and finally install these packages:

sudo apt-get install vmware-server vmware-tools-kernel-modules

This will install the VMWare tools and server console as well as the server software. You will be prompted to enter your serial number and then it all just works. From that point on you can upgrade easily through apt-get upgrade when a new version becomes available on the Feisty repositories.

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