CB1, INC.

Thursday, April 19th, the latest rev of the Linux distro Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) was released. I wasted no time to download it and installing it in one of my trusty virtual machines.

I have a Macbook Pro and I use Parallels Desktop for Mac as my VM software. Installing previous Ubuntu releases was a piece of cake, but Ubuntu 7.04 was being a little "feisty" to install.

After trying the DVD, Desktop, and Alternative versions, I still had no luck. It was hard to tell what the problem was on the DVD and Desktop editions since they were live CDs and the screen just went blank. The Alternative version gave me a clue that the installer couldn't load the CD/DVD drivers.

After doing some digging, I discovered there is a problem with both Parallels CD/DVD driver and the latest Linux kernel that ships with 7.04.

To get around the problem, I changed the OS Type to "Solaris" and OS Version to "Other Solaris" and then tried again to install Ubuntu.

Ubuntu's installer found the drive without a problem and successfully installed the operating system. After the installation was complete, I shutdown the VM and changed the OS Type back to "Linux" and OS Version to "Other Linux kernel 2.6". I have no idea if the CD/DVD drive works after changing these back, nor do I know if there are any issues with just leaving the OS Type as Solaris.

My hopes are that either a new kernel and/or Parallels releases an update to fix this problem. Honestly though, I have never used the CD/DVD drive in a Linux VM since everything I install is downloaded.

Has anybody else had this issue or come up with a better workaround?