As a follow-up to my most popular post ever, installing KUbuntu 10.04 32-bit on VirtualBox and Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile Developer, I am going to do another version for Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit running on VMware workstation 7.1.3. the installation process is mostly the same on VirtualBox, you will just have to follow a different method for setting up shared folders (you can use my previous post for that). Several things have changed in the last year and I haven’t done 10 minutes of development work, not to mention I am not even sure where the files for the 10.04 VM are! (update, I found them, but they failed to boot, might be the 600 freaking virtualbox updates since then!!) This has taken me 6 days to write up, I’m almost, but not quite done, AND it is close to 3000 words at this point, so I am going to post it in three four parts, so in any case let’s get started.

**anything in bold is either a heading or a command for you to type into a terminal window! (heading should also be underlined)

Part one – setting up Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit
(this is hoping you already have VMware workstation installed on your system, as I am not going to go through that process again! it was a nightmare and took weeks to get going on my current system. As background I am running Ubuntu (not KUbuntu like last time) 10.10 x64 as my host machine, and Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit as the guest. I am installing all of the development files on the VM, because the first time I tried setting Appcelerator’s Titanium on my host machine, I had to format and reinstall the OS, now I have learned the power of home virtualization and run almost everything through it instead of on my actual desktop. The most important thing I have learned is only assign 1 cpu core to any VM until you find it runs at 100% when you perform tasks within it, then increase the number of cores by 1, the second most important thing I have learned using virtual machines is to never install a 64-bit OS, things are just easier to do with a 32-bit OS. (currently the only computer in my house running windows is my work laptop and I’d change that if I didn’t think it would get me fired!)

1. have a working operating system
2. install VMware workstation
3. download ubuntu 10.10 32-bit and use the automatically install VM guest tools options to simplify
4. I recommend naming the vm something useful, like android-dev, or titanium-mobile
5. then set the host name the same
6. make the Virtual HDD at least 20GB (I made mine 38GB and we shall see if that is satisfactory over time…)
7. after testing with the kitchen sink I have not seen the RAM usage go over 450MB, so let’s assign 768MB of ram at this time
8. go ahead and set 1 CPU with 2 cores, as having the Android Emulator running will peg 1 core at 100% all the time
9. follow-up by setting the account password the same as the VM name, so if you don’t use it for 6 months after setting it up, you’ll still be able to log in



10. next you need to setup shared folders in the VM, this is where we will store all of your work (on the host machine, incase something happens to the vm, you can always just wipe it and build another without losing your dev files.
1. use the VMware workstation pull-down menu VM –> settings
2. go to the options tab
3. click shared folders
4. select enabled
5. add
6. you should put what ever location you save your downloads to here, so you can get files from your host, then open them in the VM, I named this one “downloads”
7. add a second shared folder, this one is where you want to keep your development environment, in case you need to reinstall Titanium on another machine later, I named this one “projects”



11. log into the new Ubuntu VM and let’s change some settings
1. (you might not have to do this, but I did) go to the System pull-down menu –> preferences –> monitors and change the resolution to something more appealing than 800×600, make sure it is at least 1280×900 or you won’t be able to create a UVGA854 display android VM (even that might not be enough, but it is just enough for a WXVGA800 AVD)
2. click make default, enter your password, then close all of those windows
3. go to the Applications pull-down menu –> accessories –> terminal
4. sudo apt-get update |sudo apt-get install dpkg dpkg-dev |sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade
5. now, while that runs, let’s do some other things, go to the System pull-down menu –> preferences –> screen saver
6. uncheck Activate screensaver when computer is idle and uncheck lock screen when screensaver is active
7. click power management at the bottom and set display to never
8. click make default, enter your password, then close all of those windows
9. go to the system pull-down menu –> administration –> login screen and click “unlock” enter your password, and set it to log in automatically, then close all of those windows
10. in the top right hand corner of the VM desktop click the power button (should be red) and select Restart to complete Update
12. now open up your terminal again (if you closed it)
• sudo apt-get autoremove
13. the bad news is that you have to reinstall VMware tools, because you now have a new kernel
1. go to the VMware pull-down menu VM –> reinstall VMware tools
2. click ok on the popup
3. the CD should auto-mount and open in a new window
1. if not go to the Ubuntu Guest pull-down menu Places –>Computer
2. on the left column go to File System –> /mnt –> open the VMware guest additions
3. double click on the tar.gz file
4. right click the folder vmware-tools-distrib
5. select extract to…
6. Put it in your downloads folder
7. when it finishes, close all of these windows and go back to your terminal window
4. navigate in the terminal to the vmware tools folder cd~/Downloads/vmware-tools-distrib
5. sudo ./vmware-install.pl
6. type yes to over-write the current installation
7. press enter 10 times (when prompted!) to select the default installation locations (you will notice the script builds the tools from the source, which is nice), when it finishes, move on to the next step
8. sudo vi /etc/fstab
1. [Ctrl+f] – this should move the cursor to the last line
2. o – this should insert a blank line at the end of the file and begin editing mode, copy and paste the following section and edit to fit the names you used or an alternate location if you don’t like mine.


/mnt/hgfs/downloads /home/sdk/Downloads none bind,rw,user,auto,exec 0 0
/mnt/hgfs/projects /home/sdk/android none bind,rw,user,auto,exec 0 0


3. [Esc]
4. : wq!
5. [enter] – this will (in order) exit edit mode, save and quit the vi editor
6. mkdir ~/android – you have to have an existing directory or the mount will fail!
9. go to the power button in the top left corner of the guest screen (notice that it is grey this time, not red as there is not an update restart required)

   **note – it would appear that the vmware guest tools do not install and mount the shares before the mounting process for the OS (which makes sense if you think about it), this means every time you restart this VM you will have to type “s” twice to skip the failed mounting of these two bind mounts. an inconvenience, but remembering to type sudo mount -a is a lot easier than almost anything else you could do as an alternative, only because mount requires super user rights and during the login process you cannot respond to a prompt for your password.

14. goto the VMware workstation pull-down menu VM –> Snapshot –>Take Snapshot
15. change the snapshot name to: pre-java install
16. put the description as: OS installed, configured, updated, restarted, VMware tools reinstalled for new kernel, restarted again. ready for Java SDK installation
17. click ok to start the snapshot

Ok, this is the end of part one, here we have installed our Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit OS, updated it and created a snapshot so we have a quick easy back-out in case anything screws up during the java setup (this has happened to me more than once in the past!). Before continuing on, go to your home folder and make sure the 2 shared folders show up where you put them! else this next part might not be very pretty for you…

1. part two
2. part three
3. part four