Geekons.com: Christian Technology Podcast

Geek-Tweak:

• This tutorial requires that you download UbuntuCE (I will be trying out Ubuntu CE 2.0)
• First, download VMWare Server and install it (be sure to register for your free serial numbers!)
• Open the VMWare server console and connect to “Local host”
• On the primary “localhost” tab, click “Create a new Virtual Machine”
• Click Next
• Keep “Typical” selected and click Next
• Choose “Linux” from the Guest Operating System list, and under version choose “Ubuntu”
• Click Next
• Give it a Name, like UbuntuCE or “Steve”
• I usually leave the Location as the default, but feel free to put the files anywhere you want
• Keep bridged network selected (This allows your virtual machine to have its own IP!)
• Click Next
• Choose how much space you want to make the virtual machine's hard drive to be. You cannot expand this later, so choose wisely! If you just want to test Ubuntu out and don't plan on using it, the default 8GB should be plenty.
• Click Next
• Go browse the Geekons website, and leave your feedback in the forum as the new disk is created.
• Go to your new virtual machine's tab and click “Edit Virtual Machine Settings” or “Edit this Virtual Machine”
• Select “CD-Rom 1” from the left menu, and instead of using your default CD Rom drive, change it to “Use ISO Image” and click “Browse” then browse to the Ubuntu CD ISO that you downloaded earlier and click OK, then click OK again to go back to your Virtual Machine tab.
• Now, just “Power on this virtual machine” to start it up!
• You are first greeted with the UbuntuCE boot menu, you can test out your media for defects here, to make sure everything downloaded properly, or just choose the default menu option to start Ubuntu CE.
• After Ubuntu CE is loaded, you can play around with it to see what you think, or just double-click the “Install” icon on the desktop. (As of now you are running Ubuntu CE in memory, which makes it very slow!)
• Choose your language and click “Forward”
• Choose a city in your time zone and click “Forward” (You can set the time by clicking “Set Time” but this always takes a while for me, so I like to do that after it is installed)
• Choose your keyboard layout and click “Forward”
• Fill in your details, and don't worry about being accurate, this isn't for registration or anything like that! (oh, and keep in mind your username is all lower-case!)
• Also, keep in mind your password typed here will also be your administrator password, so if you plan on having multiple users, don't start with your kids' login, start with yours, then add an account for your friends or family later, so they don't have access to the admin password unless you want them to.
• The name of the computer should be short and to the point, and usually fun. (I like to use characters and locations from C.S. Lewis or Tolkien books.)
• Click “Forward”
• Wait for it to detect your hard drives, but keep in mind it isn't really finding your hard drives, it is finding the virtual hard drive we set up in VMWare Server!
• Choose “Erase entire disk: SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) – 8.6 GB VMWare, VMWare Virtual S”
• Click “Forward”
• You are finally shown a list of all your choices, just to be sure you know what you are doing. If it all looks good, click “Install” and go post some more topics at forums.geekons.com!
• When it is done, I like to “continue using this CD” then click the red icon in the top right corner of the monitor and choose “Shut Down” (Hitting “Enter” when it asks you to)
• Now edit the virtual machine settings again and change the CD Rom back to the default CD Rom Device.
• You can now use VMWare Server Console to start and stop your UbuntuCE virtual machine. If you want to use your mouse to control your normal windows install, just press “ctrl+alt” on your keyboard and your mouse will be “released” from the virtual machine and brought back to your normal (Host) machine.