Installing VMWare on Ubuntu is surprisingly easy these days. It has been a couple major releases since I did so, but this weekend I rebuilt my VM host box.
I installed Ubuntu 9.04 server and chose the Virtual Host option. I really don’t have a good reason why other than that’s what the box would be. Once done, this leaves the box at a command line prompt.
After a little reading, I found out that VMWare Server 2 now installs with a web-based admin interface and not the normal GUI-required interface. Whoa, big improvement! I don’t need Gnome anymore!
The rest of the installation went smoothly with the only difficulty coming from downloading the VMWare Server 2 tarball through Lynx (hint: sign up for a throw-away account on a different box, then just sign in on Lynx). But after that, no more magic tricks to get VMWare to work on Ubuntu. I accepted all defaults other than VM storage location. I had a passwd set for root, so I could use root for now as the login.
You’re so right, it’s definitely very “painless” now (and a great official guide is available, too: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware/Server)
The web-based frontend is definitely a nice improvement, but sometimes a bit buggy (at least for me).
Keep up your great work!