Testing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 1

The latest version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distro, known as Lucid Lynx, was just released the other day and, though it is an early alpha release, I wanted to give it a shot in a virtual machine. Installation in VirtualBox was smooth and polished, but I ran into some problems with installing VBox's Guest Additions, which allow for higher resolutions and, more importantly, mouse pointer integration (the magic that lets you move your cursor from host to guest OSs without mucking around with capturing the mouse pointer).

Here is a simple fix for the mouse pointer integration:

Fire up a terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

This file used to be how Ubuntu managed devices attached to your computer, but they're trying to move away from it. Now, the system will accept such a file, but it tries to figure things out on-the-fly as much as it can, hence the currently-empty file.

So, into this empty file, copy/paste:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "VBoxMouse"
Driver "vboxmouse"
Option "CorePointer"
EndSection

All this is doing is telling your virtual machine to look for the vboxmouse driver and use it. Now, when you reboot, you should have proper mouse integration.

However, if this somehow causes problems and you want to undo it, just type into a terminal:

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and then reboot your system.

To fix the small resolution, you just need to add another section to your xorg.conf, so type into a terminal:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and below the mouse section, paste in:

Section "Screen"

DefaultDepth 24

SubSection "Display"

Depth 15

Modes "1920x1440" "1920x1200" "1900x1200" "1920x1080" "1600x1200" "1680x1050" "1600x1024" "1600x1000" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1440x900" "1280x960" "1366x768" "1280x800" "1152x864" "1280x768" "1280x720" "1024x768" "1280x600" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480"

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Depth 16

Modes "1920x1440" "1920x1200" "1900x1200" "1920x1080" "1600x1200" "1680x1050" "1600x1024" "1600x1000" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1440x900" "1280x960" "1366x768" "1280x800" "1152x864" "1280x768" "1280x720" "1024x768" "1280x600" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480"

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Depth 24

Modes "1920x1440" "1920x1200" "1900x1200" "1920x1080" "1600x1200" "1680x1050" "1600x1024" "1600x1000" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1440x900" "1280x960" "1366x768" "1280x800" "1152x864" "1280x768" "1280x720" "1024x768" "1280x600" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480"

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Depth 8

Modes "1920x1440" "1920x1200" "1900x1200" "1920x1080" "1600x1200" "1680x1050" "1600x1024" "1600x1000" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1440x900" "1280x960" "1366x768" "1280x800" "1152x864" "1280x768" "1280x720" "1024x768" "1280x600" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480"

EndSubSection

Device "Device[0]"

Identifier "Screen[0]"

Monitor "Monitor[0]"

EndSection

Important: Each of the lines that start with "Modes" should have all of the resolutions following it on the same line, and they should only include resolutions that your monitor can actually produce, so you might have to delete some of them (e.g., my monitor is a 20" that only goes up to 1680x1050, so I deleted all of the resolutions that were greater than this).

Again, if this causes any problems, you can either delete the section of the xorg.conf file or delete the xorg.conf file entirely and then reboot to get things back to the way they were.

Shared folders between the guest and host also appear to be broken at the moment, but I don't know what to do about it. Other than that, things have gone well for me. Compiz works fine and I have a fancy composite desktop with wobbly windows and true transparency.