The 2 Oct/09 Beta release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (desktop-amd64 version) installs fine in latest Parallels VM on my 2009 13-inch MBP operating in clamshell mode with Apple 24-inch LED Cinema Display. The only gotcha: must specify "acpi=off", both under fn-F6 in Installer (or when using liveCD) and later adding this to /etc/default/grub as GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi=off" (to be followed by "sudo update-grub" command). Xorg correctly finds the 1920x1200 display resolution (as well as the other common Apple 16:10 resolutions). Enjoy!
I was able to get the 64-bit Karmic desktop installed also, on my 15" mid-2009 mbp... however, I am unable to get parallels-tools installed. I'm using Parallels build 3846. Did you make any progress there?
I have tried to follow the recipe in another thread (changes to a couple of source files), and then the compilation of the modules succeeded, but installing those modules still failed... I'm not spending a lot of effort here, since I don't use the functionality of Parallels Tools anyway... I do notice, though, that 9.10 Karmic on shutdown fails at the very last step: power down. So, need to stop the VM manually everytime by freeing the mouse and hitting the Stop button twice. No such problem in an otherwise identical Debian testing (Squeeze) VM. I've filed a bug report with Ubuntu Launchpad on this.
The failure to power down is because we have to disable ACPI in order to boot it up. Do you have a link to the other thread where the changes are made to the source files?
I did an install of 8.10 AMD-64, installed parallels-tools, and then used update-manager to bring it up to Karmic. This at the very least retained the video driver in X.org, which is all I really cared about (dynamic resolution based on host window size). Hopefully this'll be addressed in an update pretty soon though!
User trixie posted the following in http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=91037 Parallels Tools then compiles OK in Ubuntu Karmic with 2.6.31-14 AMD64 kernel, but fails on inserting the kernel module.