Beware of Ubuntu 14.04

T

Thomas Hartwig

Member
After 3 weeks of testing I decided to step back to Ubuntu 13.10. The X server support is much more stable and Unity is working ok. There are a lot of glitches in 14.04 either related to Parallels drivers or Ubuntu itself. Sometimes my whole X session crashed.
So for a stable system please consider to keep at 13.10 until some time has passed. I did not see big improvements in 14.04 which I would miss.

JM2C
Thomas
 
I upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04 and now I'm stuck with a screen resolution of 800x600...on a 21.5 " iMac ! The last time I upgraded (Ubuntu 13.10, see my other entries) I needed to set up a completely new VM due to a compilation error in Parallels. It starts to get annoying and takes to much time.

Definitely no intention to upgrade to newer versions of Parallels, I will rather look for other VM solutions by vmWare or VirtualBox. It can't be much worse. I just want to upgrade every once in a while to the recent version of Ubuntu - without all that hassle afterwards.
 
I had really weird things happening with the X session with an Ubuntu 14.04 desktop guest OS after installing Parallels Tools with the latest version of Parallels 9. I lost my tool bar and everything else besides a Desktop with the "Parallels Shared Folders" shortcut that comes with having configured the VM to share my Home Directory from the Host OS. There is something wrong with the latest Parallels tools, as my X session was ok before installing Parallels Tools and as I didn't have the problem with this guest OS with VMWare on Windows at work.

But, I fixed the problem with a little console work, and I haven't had any issues since. So, you don't have to beware of Ubuntu 14.04 too much.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Start up your wonky Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop VM.
2. Log in, and after everything settles down, make sure the Parallels Desktop Status Bar for the VM is showing; you can toggle it using the View menu on the Parallels Desktop system menu.
3. Click to keyboard icon on the VM's Status Bar (It's the left-most icon in the group of icons to the right.), and select 'Ctrl-Alt-F1' to get the Ubuntu console.
4. Log in with an administrator account, such as the one you used to initially install the wonky Parallels Tools.
5. Do the following: cd /etc/X11
6. Do the following: ls -al
7. Look for the the following file left in limbo by Parallels Tools: xorg.conf.[datestring], where [datestring] reflects the date and time you installed the wonky Parallels Tools (e.g., xorg.conf.20140525)
8. Do the following to rename the xorg.conf.[datestring] file to just xorg.conf, using your admin password: sudo mv xorg.conf.[datestring] xorg.conf
9. Do the following to force X11 to reconfig:
a. Change to you home directory: cd ~
b. Look for a directory named '.config'. (Note the leading '.' on the filename - it's a hidden file.) If it is there, do the following to remove it: rm -rf .config
c. Look for a directory named '.compiz'. (Again, note the leading '.' on the filename.) If it is there, which this one may not be, do the following to remove it: rm -rf .compiz
10. Reboot, using your admin password, by doing the following: sudo reboot

When Ubuntu 14.04 comes back up, everything should be fine. That is, until they push the next Parallel Tools update and haven't addressed this issue. Then you would just have do all of this over to fix it again (unless things are messed up in some other way by). ;-)
 
Hi Chris , thank you for your detailed post. My decision to warn about this release was not only based on a missing menu bar but also on stability issues I had while working with this release. So I was under the impression there are more problems than just the missing menu. With 13.10 I have never crashes of X for weeks even if I don't restart the system. With 14.04 X crashed almost every day.
IMHO Parallels is not ready yet for this release and as I said already I don't see any feature/performance benefits for 14.04 which makes it worth to have such trouble.

JM2C
Thomas
 
I have similar issues with the update to Kubuntu 14.04 (Ubuntu's KDE desktop version). I have now twice allowed the in-place upgrade from 13.10 to 14.04 and both times have lost the functionality of Parallels Tools. In fact, the mouse (my Macbook Air's trackpad) is no longer recognized, and I can't re-install Parallels Tools. When I try to do so, I get the dialog asking me if I want to continue, but when I press "Yes," nothing happens. When I check the CD icon in the status bar, it makes no difference whether the tools ISO is mounted or not. When I jump into the command line, I cannot find the ISO mounted in the Kubuntu file system. It's as if the Parallels Tools ISO is invisible to the VM.

I've tried the remedies posted here for Ubuntu and Unity, but they do not solve this particular problem. That I've had this occur twice -- and only on Kubuntu 13.10 (I have VMs for CentOS, crunchbang linux, Mint 16 and several Windows versions, and they all work) -- so I'm led to believe it's the 14.04 release that's the problem.
 
Note that the 800x600 resolution comes from the framebuffer setting in Grub. I suspect Parallels Tools allows dynamic resizing by talking to the vesa framebuffer driver in the kernel.

If the KB article mentioned above doesn't work, you can set a new framebuffer mode, by adding:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x32
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

to /etc/default/grub

and then running: grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

This will boot to 1024x768 with 32-bit color. Xorg will then start in 1024x768 resolution.
 
AdamS5 said:
Note that the 800x600 resolution comes from the framebuffer setting in Grub. I suspect Parallels Tools allows dynamic resizing by talking to the vesa framebuffer driver in the kernel.

If the KB article mentioned above doesn't work, you can set a new framebuffer mode, by adding:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x32
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

to /etc/default/grub

and then running: grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

This will boot to 1024x768 with 32-bit color. Xorg will then start in 1024x768 resolution.
Click to expand...
Great workaround. We will check it in our lab. Thanks anyways!
 
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