Anticipated the upcoming next release of Ubuntu, I decided to setup an Ubuntu Server Edition sandbox under VMware to test the configuration scripts. I do not know about you, but I feel a little anxious about upgrading the customer-facing Internet server, fixing bugs in real-time.

VMware Fusion's update tool suggested me to download and install version 2.06. I did that then created an Ubuntu sandbox virtual machine and installed the 64-bit Server Edition ISO image (ubuntu-9.04-server-amd64.iso).

That is when I tried to mount an OSX user account folder on the sandbox virtual machine that things starting to break down. The "Install VMware Tools" menu did not seem to do anything. I could not find the VMware Tools .tar.gz package anywhere on the filesystem either. Hopefully, I already had a Ubuntu Desktop Edition virtual machine and the VMware Tools DVD-ROM mounted correctly there as /media/cdrom1/VMwareTools-7.9.7-196839.tar.gz. Since I already had setup that Ubuntu Desktop Edition virtual machine with an ssh server, I remote copied the package onto the Ubuntu Server Edition sandbox. After installing the VMware tools and rebooting the virtual machine, I could then access the OSX files through /mnt/hgfs/username as usual.

# On the Ubuntu Desktop Edition virtual machine:
ifconfig | grep 'inet addr'

# On the Ubuntu Server Edition virtual machine:
scp ipaddress:/media/cdrom1/VMwareTools-7.9.7-196839.tar.gz .
tar zxvf VMwareTools-7.9.7-196839.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
sudo shutdown -r 0

I still cannot copy or paste from and to the Ubuntu Server Edition virtual machine and still require to use ctrl + command key combination; maybe because there is no X11 installed on that virtual machine. In any case, I have a way to move files from the OSX filesystem to the Ubuntu Server Edition sandbox so debugging of the upgrade path for the live server is under way.