Strange VMware Tools issue while upgrading one of my Ubuntu 6.06.2 VMware Guests to Ubuntu 8.04.1.  The Ubuntu upgrade itself seemed to go just fine, but installing the updated VMware Tools gave me an error:

Your kernel was built with "gcc" version "4.2.3", while you are
trying to use "/usr/bin/gcc" version "4.2.4". This configuration
is not recommended and VMware Player may crash if you'll continue.
Please try to use exactly same compiler as one used for building
your kernel. Do you want to go with compiler "/usr/bin/gcc"
version "4.2.4" anyway? [no]

It didn’t take very long to find a thread about this – http://ge.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php?t=963825.  I took the suggest of some of the users here and chose YES.  SNAPSHOT YOUR MACHINES BEFORE YOU TRY SOMETHING UNPROVEN!

Well now it complained that it couldnt locate the Linux C Header files:

The header files in /usr/include are generally for C libraries, not for the
running kernel. If you do not have kernel header files in your /usr/src
directory, you probably do not have the kernel-source package installed. Are yousure that /usr/include contains the header files associated with your running
kernel? [no]

Weird.  So now I had to manually install the Linux Headers.  I did this by issuing:

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

I now re-ran perl /usr/src/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl.  I again of course had to tell the installer to continue compiling using gcc 4.2.4, but now it didnt complain about the C headers. The install completed successfully.

I had completely forgotten about this. WIth past ESX builds Ubuntu was only *sort of* supported.  In order to get VMWare Tools installed on Ubuntu you had to basically merge the native VMWare Tools with open-vmware-tools.

The process of merging the two sets to tools together was simple enough, and successful enough – but doesnt it feel great when something is really supported and when it works the way it’s supposed to? For the shiny new supported VMWare Tools I simply ran ./vmware-install.pl from the console of my Guest, waited about 5 minutes and voila!

ESX 3.5 Update 3 Release Notes

Ubuntu 8.10 due Thursday. Profits? Not so fast | Latest Business Tech News – CNET News

I don’t think it will possible to make a lot of money, or maybe any money, selling the desktop,” Shuttleworth said. “We’re not going to try to make money selling the desktop. We force ourselves to look to services-oriented business models. I remain confident this is the right business model for the industry. Linux is the forcing function that (means) the broader software industry will shift in business models away from licensing the bits and to services.

Here we are with a new Ubuntu release, albeit a short term support desktop release….it’s exciting nonetheless.

I run Ubuntu on my laptop at home and I recently changed all my FreeBSD servers to Ubuntu 8.1 Hardy Heron and so far I have no regrets. Managing updates and software packages is a cinch. My servers run lean and mean now. No extra fluff. Packages are installed on an as-needed basis and the general structure of the Ubuntu system seems to make alot more logical sense.

The only question I have over the long term is “will Ubuntu to continue to grow and stay relevant”? Many Linux distro’s have come and gone. I’ve taken a gamble in the hopes that Ubuntu will be a long term solution and I hope many others will. I think the more people use it they will see that it is just as scalable as any other distro out there and spins like a top.

Good luck to Ubuntu and to me! Support Ubuntu by downloading it here!