Installing VMware-Server on my AMD64 box running on Ubuntu Feisty

I successfully installed VMware-Server on my laptop using this link. I thought that THAT was it. So, I decided to follow the same instructions - this time - on an AMD64 machine(the on I use at work) with a not-so-fresh Ubuntu install. Unfortunately, I ran into some tiny bumps along the way.

I don't know why these errors occurred in the first place AND I can't give a valid explanation how these fixes(the ones I found by googling) got the installation process to work. But, if you're in a hurry, then these tips might be helpful.

First, I encountered an error while compiling:
gcc: error trying to exec 'cc1plus': execvp: No such file or directory

I got this fixed by installing build-essential. This is definitely something that I should always remember everytime I need to build anything, at least only if I'm on Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install build-essentail

Second, errors occurred when vmware was trying to generate SSL keys. It seems to look for `/etc/vmware/ssl/rui.key` and `/etc/vmware/ssl/rui.crt`.

The fix is quite obvious but at that time it took me a couple of minutes of googling just to find a suitable fix. And, the fix is just to create those files by using `touch`.

sudo touch /etc/vmware/ssl/rui.key
sudo touch /etc/vmware/ssl/rui.crt

Lastly, I encountered an error after I input my serial number. I was pretty sure that it's valid. My hunch was that something else was causing the vmware installer to flag my serial number as invalid. So again, I turned to ask guidance from the Almighty... Google.

Lo and behold, all I needed to do was to install the ia32-libs package.

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

That's it. I currently have an OpenBSD4.1 guest OS on my VMware-Server.

mounting a UFS formatted flash disk on a Linux box

I have a USB flash disk with a UFS file system. If your asking why my flash disk is on UFS, well, it's a long story and completely irrelevant to this post. Here's how I got it mounted on my laptop running on Ubuntu.


I successfully mounted it on my lappy using:
sudo mount -t ufs -o ro,ufstype=44bsd /dev/sdb1 /mnt

The are lots of ufstype options: old, 44bsd, 5xbsd, ufs2, nextstep... just to name a few. If you don't specify a ufstype option it will default to old, which in my case didn't work. Then, I tried ufs2 and it also failed.

I recalled using the O1 option when I formatted my flash disk, like this:
newfs -O1 /dev/da0s1a

The O1 option is used for ufs1 format. So, I tried 44bsd because it's the closest thing to old that isn't ufs2. Heh. Well, 44bsd did the trick. I didn't bother testing 5xbsd. But, I'm guessing it would work too.