So following on from my earlier adventures running Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake under Microsoft’s VirtualPC I decided to try VMware instead.

The free VMware Player installed painlessly, and with their pre-built Ubuntu Image I was up and running in a matter of minutes.

However, the pre-built image (virtual appliance in VMware parlance) is for the Breezy Badger release of Ubuntu, rather than the latest bleeding edge Dapper Drake version that I wanted to try. That’s no problem though, just change all mentions of ‘breezy’ in /etc/apt/sources.list to ‘dapper’ then run apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade and voila a nice shiny new Dapper Drake install.

The official instructions for a Breezy to Dapper upgrade are a little more lengthy and worth following if you have problems.

The only other problem I had was with the clock running too slowly, which appears to be a known VMware issue which is easily reolved by adding clock=pit nosmp noapic nolapic to the kopt= line in to /boot/grub/menu.lst (keep this line commented out!) and then running update-grub

And best of all, if the standard virtual-appliances don’t suit your taste then it’s easy enough to create your own with tools like VMX Builder. Thanks for the tip, Craig.