My adventures with Hardy

I finally upgraded my computer to Ubuntu 8.04, but unfortunately my VMWare server didn’t work any more. That led me into a whole bunch of things that I noticed wrong with my upgrade. Allow me to explain the idiocity.

First, for some reason, even after upgrading, I was still booting into the old 7.10 kernel(2.6.22-14). A quick change to the /boot/grub/menu.lst file cleared that up. I just copied one of the other entries and then modified it so that it pointed to the new kernel (2.6.24-16).

Great. I booted up and then…had no wireless. I had forgotten how I set it up before, until I came across this page. For some reason, Hardy breaks newer Broadcom wireless cards (BCM4312, rev. 02 to be exact). But that page has pretty direct instructions on how to fix your po’ computer…that is, if you have internet…which you probably do, if you’re looking at this page.

Great. Ok now I can install VMWare. I had it installed before, but something made it get all scared and I suppose it scurried away to /dev/null for eternity. Suicide must have been more appealing to the VMWare. Apparently there are issues with VMWare on Hardy, but following this page seemed simple enough. Except when I ran:

sudo ./runme.pl

It gave me this error:

A previous installation of VMware software has been detected.
    
The previous installation was made by the tar installer (version 3).
    
Keeping the tar3 installer database format.
    
Error: Unable to execute "/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall.pl."

So great, it left pieces of itself behind, except without a shovel to clean them up with. This was easily cleared up by removing the /etc/init.d/vmware directory. After that, everything worked great. I was able to open up my old XP instance perfectly.