As most of you know that read my blogs or twitter posts, I work with more than one virtualization vendor’s products. VMware has a huge library of virtual appliances, but it’s a bit of a hassle to convert them to other platforms.
Recently I’ve been working on upgrading our training and demo kits. Part of our upgrade is to have the setups self documented by using a dedicated internal wiki on the kits themselves. I looked at several options including doing a fresh build from scratch.
Eventually, I found Turnkey Linux appliances. I like them because they aren’t already built appliances for one vendor; instead, they are Ubuntu server .iso files with the software already installed and configured. That way you can install on pretty much any virtualization vendor that supports Ubuntu or Debian as a guest OS. Then it’s just a matter of installing the tools.
I installed a Mediawiki appliance on ESX (New Virtual Machine>Ubuntu 32-bit, defaults on CPU and RAM and whatever size disk you want) and here are the post install steps to get the VMware tools installed.
Refresh to the latest repositories.
- apt-get update
Install the missing packages:
- apt-get install gcc
- apt-get install make
- apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.24-23-generic (check your version of the kernel and match it)
Insert virtual CD ROM image by selecting ”install vmware tools” from the VM’s Edit menu.
mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-xxxx.xxx…tar.gz /tmp
cd /tmp
tar -zxvf VMwareTools-xxxxx.xxx….tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl
Select the defaults, you may have to tell it to use a newer version of gcc on one of the questions.
You should have the VMWare tools installed at this point.
Upgrade the system
- apt-get upgrade
Start wikiing.
Handy Cloud Applications and Web Based Services Make My Migrations Much Easier
I move between computers and OS’s fairly regularly. I’ve started using a few really handy web-based applications to make the moves as painless as possible and without having a long downtime when I choose to install a different Linux distro or Windows 7 as the pre-release versions drip out from Microsoft.
As I’ve added these apps, I’m finding that I can move pretty quickly to a new setup very quickly now. Here are the ones I’ve found so far to be the most handy.
Free:
Office applications, email, calendaring.
Google Mail, Docs, Calendar http://google.com
File storage, free up to 2GB. It’s easy to set up and use.
Dropbox www.dropbox.com
Great note-taking, pasting functions. This is quickly becoming my memory. In fact, I wrote this blog post in Evernote.
Evernote www.evernote.com
Firefox plug-ins:
Xmarks - syncs your bookmarks and passwords
Delicious – I still use Delicious to go across browsers to bookmark links.
Not Free (for full versions):
Google Apps http://google.com/a I really like Google Apps. They do nearly everything I need on a normal basis.
Carbonite www.carbonite.com All my critical files are automatically backed up and updated every day. I don’t even think about it anymore.
I’m sure I’ll add more to this list and some may be replaced eventually since that’s the nature of our business.