Upgrading a VMware VM to Ubuntu 10.04

Source

Yesterday I tried to update an Ubuntu 9.10 VM, running VMware Fusion 3.1 beta, to Ubuntu 10.04. Two significant problems arose:

  1. At the login screen, the keyboard didn't work
  2. the boot process paused because hgfs could not be mounted

Here's a log of the problems and worries encountered, together with their solutions.

Grub Configuration

Late in the Ubuntu upgrade process a warning appeared, saying Grub could not be configured (or words to that effect — I wasn't paying close attention) and asking for confirmation that the installation should continue without any changes to grub's configuration. I confirmed. After all, this was a VM instance with only a single operating system installed.

Can't Mount hgfs

On reboot the console reported that a problem had occurred while mounting /mnt/hgfs. If offered to continue without mounting, and I accepted.

Unresponsive Keyboard

When the Ubuntu login screen appeared, the keyboard was unresponsive. This made it difficult to enter my password.

Thanks to this thread in the VMware Communities forums, I was able to login after enabling the onscreen keyboard. (Click on the accessibility icon — the "little man in the circle" — check the onscreen keyboard toggle, and restart the VM.) Once logged in, the keyboard worked just fine.

VMware Tools Out of Date

VMware detected that VMware Tools were out of date for this VM. (It may have reported that they weren't installed. I can't recall.)

No xorg.conf?

I started the VMware Tools installation process and encountered a warning I hadn't seen before:

Detected X.org version 7.6.6.

The configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf can not be found.  Do you want to create a new one? (yes/no) [yes]

Not sure what to do, I accepted the default response.

Keyboard Fixed

After the tools finished installing I rebooted the VM. This time, at the login screen the keyboard worked. A wild guess is that the VMware Tools re-installation fixed this problem by reconfiguring the console.

Fixing hgfs Ownership

/mnt/hgfs had been auto-mounted, but as usual the ownership and permissions were wrong. I patched this as documented in a previous post.

Fixing hgfs automount Failure

Ubuntu continued to complain at startup that it had failed to mount hgfs. It continued to request user permission to skip mounting hgfs. But once the boot completed /mnt/hgfs was mounted with correct permissions.

To prevent Ubuntu complaining of failure to mount hgfs, I added a "nobootwait" option to its entry to tell mountall(8) not to hold up the boot for this filesystem. The entry now reads:

.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs rw,ttl=1,uid=my_uid,gid=my_gid,nobootwait 0 0

Now Ubuntu boots without complaint, the keyboard works, and /mnt/hgfs is mounted with correct ownership and permissions.