my name is mwd

I’m not on the latest parallels, so your milage may vary with this, but judging from complains on the web, perhaps not. Basically Ubuntu 7.04 doesn’t like to install in a linux configured Parallels VM. It hangs whilst booting the live CD (at least from an ISO image, and I’d expect the same from a physical CD, but I’ve not tried it). If you look on a virtual terminal you’ll see the boot is stuck in initram, having not mounted the casperfs image on the CD.

Looking around the web the cause appears to be that the Linux kernel with Ubuntu 7.04 and the Parallels CD-ROM drive emulation don’t get on well. So you need to do some trickery to get it to work. I’ve read a few variations on a theme, but I thought I’d write down what worked for me here:

1. When you create your new VM, specify Solaris rather than linux. For some reason this means the kernel will happily talk to the emulated CD-ROM drive.

2. BEFORE booting your VM to do the install, add any devices you want for your VM, such as USB controllers. The Solaris configured VM has little configured by default. You can add them later I guess, but it’ll just be more effort.

3. Boot the live CD and do an install. When you reboot after the install you must shut down the VM and edit the VM’s configuration to set it as a Linux VM. If you leave it as a Solaris VM it won’t boot properly.

There, done. I’m still not sure it’s 100% happy as disk access seems a little tardy, but at least it’s up and running.

See, I can occasionally write posts that have nothing to do with motorbikes…