At Work with Linux: Linux Mint 12 Installation Failure


This post will be short and sweet. I attempted to install Linux Mint 12, 64-bit, as a virtual machine using VMware's Player, version 4.0.1, on one of the workstations in the lab. The workstation was running Windows 2K8R2 as the host OS.

A very nice feature of Player is the ability to boot directly from the ISO rather than burning the ISO to physical media and then booting the virtual machine from that. I hate having physical media littering the lab, and the ISOs can all be stored on the SAN and accessed if needed at any time without having to hunt down a physical disc.

I had no problems booting Linux Mint 12 in this fashion. It booted and allowed me to begin the installation of Linux Mint on a VM. The problem is that about a third of the way through the installation problem the installer hung. Not once, but twice. Both times I started with a freshly created VM. After the second hang I basically gave up and moved on.

I suspect that the hang was due to a network access problem. I know the network was reachable, as I was able to configure the virtual ethernet controller with a manual IP address and the DNS server addresses. I could basically ping any address in the lab. The problem was trying to figure out how to configure the proxy server we use. Normally I don't worry so much about this as I can add those bits after the initial installation, and they pick up the updates that might be sitting out there. If it wasn't a proxy issue, then I don't know what the problem might have been. In any event I've moved on (see the next posting).

Too bad. I was really looking forward to giving this release a whirl.

Update 2 December

It's been fixed. Read http://blogbeebe.blogspot.com/2011/12/at-work-with-linux-third-times-charm.html

Comments

  1. I had a problem installing behind a proxy. The following worked for me:

    1. Define the proxy (Menu -> System Settings -> Network -> Network proxy). I selected the "Manual" method and specified the proxy settings.

    2. Open a Terminal and check that the proxy variables are set (env command)

    3. Execute the "ubiquity" command in the terminal window. After it launched I was able to complete the installation.

    HTH.

    Regards
    Willem

    ReplyDelete

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