If you find your self creating a virtual machine and it crashes (and maybe your OS as well) during the installation. It might be something to do with the host I/O caching option.

I had this problem when the VDI file was on my RAID. I didn't experience problems if the VDI was on a single disk. Both disk had XFS partitions.

The trick... Go to your VM. Go to Settings > Storange > HDD controller (can be IDE/SATA/SCSI/SAS) and select "Use host I/O cache".

This should do the trick. If it doesn't the first time, maybe you get a error saying it cannot read/write to /dev/sda, power off your guest OS and power it on again. Now it should be working.

Here is the link to the forum with the answer of Frank Mehnert

I struggeled with VMware....

After a screensaver or something .... It just hangs. If you ssh from another machine, you are able to kill it and start working, but your control and shift will not be working.

The solution is simple (if you don't need it). Disable 3D acceleration.

And it now just keeps working.

This is my "not-to-forget-steps-when-installing-ubuntu-server" document. It can be incomplete on its own. If you miss anything, take a look at the links I used.

Install a minimal server with F4 from the install screen.

Packages

Next you see a list of packages, but what for? These packages are used to run a system with the following services:

• webserver with support for a mysql backend which supports php. This configuration allows you to run joomla and gallery2 for example. NOTE: we will be downgrading PHP5.3 to PHP5.2 because of joomla. (1.5.18)
• Mailserver using postfix, dovecot, sasl, amavis, clamav, fetchmail, spamassassin. With this you have a complete mailsystem for a secure and spamfree mailbox. Also I use dovecot for quotas and it allows to have server based filters using the sieve plugin.
• Subversion to have a versioning system on your scripts (like CVS)

It also delivers some security:

• rootkit check tool by rootkit hunter
• denying access from unwanted system with the use of denyhosts

Before we begin installing packages. We first make sure we have the right sources from karmic for PHP5.2.

Add the folliwng to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic.list

deb http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic main restricted
deb-src http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic main restricted
deb http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates main restricted
deb-src http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates main restricted
deb http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic universe
deb-src http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic universe
deb http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates universe
deb-src http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates universe
deb http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic multiverse
deb-src http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic multiverse
deb http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates multiverse
deb-src http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu karmic-security main restricted
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu karmic-security main restricted
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu karmic-security universe
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu karmic-security universe
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu karmic-security multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu karmic-security multiverse

execute the following commands: (as root)

echo -e "Package: php5\nPin: release a=karmic\nPin-Priority: 991\n"  | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/php > /dev/null
apt-cache search php5-|grep php5-|awk '{print "Package:", $1,"\nPin: release a=karmic\nPin-Priority: 991\n"}'|sudo tee -a /etc/apt/preferences.d/php > /dev/null
apt-cache search -n libapache2-mod-php5 |awk '{print "Package:", $1,"\nPin: release a=karmic\nPin-Priority: 991\n"}'| sudo tee -a /etc/apt/preferences.d/php > /dev/null
echo -e "Package: php-pear\nPin: release a=karmic\nPin-Priority: 991\n"  | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/preferences.d/php > /dev/null

apt-get update
apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php-db php-net-sieve php-net-socket php-pear php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-dev php5-gd php5-idn php5-imagick php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-ming php5-mysql php5-ps php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl phpmyadmin phpsysinfo

You'll get a warning that a few packages will be downgraded. And that is a good thing in this case.

Security / tools / connectivity

denyhosts gnupg nmap openssh-server ssh traceroute screen subversion ntp ntpdate rkhunter whois policykit lynx

Webserver (including packages for gallery/joomla, like ffmpeg, imagemagick, gd)

apache2-mpm-itk  mailgraph mysql-server imagemagick ffmpeg libapache2-mod-auth-mysql jhead

Mailserver

postfix postfix-mysql postgrey sasl2-bin libpam-mysql amavisd-new clamav fetchmail spamassassin dovecot-imapd dovecot-pop3d clamav-daemon zoo unzip bzip2 libnet-ph-perl libnet-snpp-perl libnet-telnet-perl nomarch lzop pax arj unrar cabextract fetchmailconf zip razor pyzor php-pear libhtml-parser-perl libdb-file-lock-perl libnet-dns-perl mailutils pflogsumm rar

DCC (part of the anti spam solution)

Unfortunately, DCC isn't part of the repository, so we do it by hand. You might want to check for a newer version. I found the files here. (I took the karmic files)

cd /tmp
wget http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonasped/ppa/ubuntu/pool/main/d/dcc/dcc-common_1.3.113-0ubuntu1~ppa1~karmic1_i386.deb
wget http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonasped/ppa/ubuntu/pool/main/d/dcc/dcc-server_1.3.113-0ubuntu1~ppa1~karmic1_i386.deb

dpkg -i dcc-common_1.3.113-0ubuntu1~ppa1~karmic1_i386.deb
dpkg -i dcc-server_1.3.113-0ubuntu1~ppa1~karmic1_i386.deb

Here is the output of dpkg --get-selections. file. You may install it all by using:

dpkg --set-selections < file
apt-get dselect-upgrade

I had some challenges to get windows running from my grub. Here is my situation.

I have a primary RAID which contains my Ubuntu 10.04 installation. I have a extra harddrive on which I have installed windows by setting it as primary for a moment in the BIOS. After installation I returned to the BIOS and set my RAID as primary again.

So, now the technical stuff. Grub2 needs to be updated. Go to your terminal in Ubuntu and type update-grub. It will update the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg. You can look in the file and you'll see windows added to the list. You'll see a menu entry for your windows with a "set root" line and a line with searches for the UUID. At the "set root" line it is going wrong. As you can see it points to (hd1,1).

Here are the tips to get this working and to keep the config even if update-grub is run again.

Create a new file in the directory /etc/grub.d and call it how you like. I use the following: 42_my_own_stuff. Add the following to it.

#!/bin/sh -e
echo "Adding personal stuff"
cat << EOF
# Adding a working menu entry for Windows 7 on the second harddisk
menuentry "Windows (Manual)" {
set root=(hd1)
chainloader +1
}
EOF

After adding it, execute the following to make it executable. chmod +x 42_my_own_stuff

You can see in the config above we point to the disk without a partition. Also we have removed the "search" line. After all is done we execute the command update-grub again. And now all is done. NOTE: You'll now have 2 Windows options to select. You'll need to select the Windows (Manual) to really boot into windows. The other one still won't work.

I feel more free when I have a swap file instead of a swap partition and here are the commands to do it.

I'm going to create a swap file of 6GB on the /data partition.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/6GB.swap bs=1024 count=6144000
mkswap /data/6GB.swap
swapon /data/6GB.swap

These 3 commands will create a file with blocks of 1mb with a size of 6GB, will then make it a swap file and after it will use the swapfile.

If you put the following in /etc/fstab it will be used at boottime as well.

###  SWAP ###
/data/6GB.swap  swap    swap    defaults        0       0

Now you're done.

I wanted to replace the GRUB with the native windows MBR. But I didn't want to spent time on searching for a windows CD and doing a repair. What to do next?

I found this site which guided me through the solution. The solution is ms-sys. Below a copy of the article to keep it save.

NOTE: the ms-sys isn't available anymore within Ubuntu. You can use this package from debian instead.

I love the program "Mod_auth_mysql", but unfortunately it doesn't work out of the box with Ubuntu 64bit.

Thanks to Josh Benner it is possible for me as well. He created a howto to make this work with the 64bit version of Ubuntu.

Here a copy of what he wrote on his site:

(btw. It does work with 9.10 as well)

The following peace is copied from http://blog.bigsmoke.us/2009/06/16/adding-locales-in-ubuntu.

---------------------------

I wanted the dates on my Kubuntu system to be shown as Dutch dates. Therefore, I needed to add a locale. The place to do it is in /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local. It now contains this:

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
nl_NL.UTF-8 UTF-8

Then run locale-gen to generate the locales.

Set the following environment vars (in profile or something) to let everything behave properly:

export LANG="nl_NL.UTF-8"
export LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_COLLATE="C"

I don’t know anymore why I chose this specific configuration. I guess this means that everything, from thousand and decimal separators to dates is Dutch, and messages are English. I don’t know, however, why the collate is C. I vaguely remember something about it otherwise not including some characters in the sorting, causing weird sorting in words with dashes and such.

---------------------------

I have created my own solution around it: