With some experimentation, I've been able to determine that Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (the Dapper Drake) boots fine on a virtual machine allocated up to 588MB of memory. Any more than that (f.e. 592MB), and it stalls for a while "loading hardware drivers" and then exhibits a variety of problems. Installing Ubuntu's i686-specific kernel didn't seem to help matters, nor did upgrading to the latest beta version of Parallels (build 1862) appear to make any difference.
tedious workaround I have this problem too. The hang during boot happens when running udevplug in the /etc/init.d/udev script. To investigate further, I commented the call to udevplug on line 64 of that script. Then I shutdown, allocated more memory (1G), and rebooted. The system is in a bad state, but it's salvageable. First X can't start. After a few failed attempts, you'll get a popup box. Say you do NOT want to diagnose now. Login at the prompt. I got a lot of errors because /dev/null is not readable followed by a hang. Interrupt (^C) to get to a prompt. Sudo su - to get to root. I tried fixing all the permissions in /dev by running udevplug manually: Code: udevplug -s -v I've had it "work" many times and cause a panic once (I rebooted and started again). After it coldplugs a lot of stuff, it hangs. ^C to get back to a prompt. To get networking running, I had to modprobe the ne2k-pci module. To get gdm running /etc/init.d/gdm restart. It's been working for me with no major issues, but I've been focussed on getting an application that uses about 1G of memory to run, and now it seems to be. (Whereas 512M was killing it.)
I have the same problem with Ubuntu Dapper Drake and Parallels update RC (1884). If I tried to use a VM greater than 512 mb, ubuntu stalls while 'loading hardware drivers', and then has all sort of problems when it finally does boot up. With a 512 mb memory VM it all seems to run fine. Macbook Pro, 2 gb mem, 1156 mb allocated for Parallels. OS 10.4.7
more memory works in 6.10 I just upgraded to Ubuntu 6.10, and I can now boot Ubuntu without problems after allocating 1GB to its virtual machine. I also changed the configuration to use "Linux other 2.6 kernel" rather than "Debian Linux", but I thought I'd tried that before, so I'm not sure if that actually contributed to the fix.
agh, so all this time i've been trying to install ubuntu server and beating my head against the wall is because i had 800mb allocated? pah! off to try 512mb.
tried 512 with ubuntu server. it gets to uncompressing linux and hangs. still no good ubuntu install since about 3 months ago, when it was fine. everything since dapper including eft is 'eft' up for me.
Hmm, I spoke too soon. It worked the first time I booted it with 1GB, but the second and subsequent times it failed with the same set of problems. So it is still broken for me.
Ubuntu server = not supported, can't install, hangs. was able to install the regular desktop 'eft' with 512mb. really want server.
i don't really need the gui, games, and extra junk, would prefer a small compact install and I don't want to take the time to uninstall to a small server either. that's the point of a server install...
Further investigation reveals that the i386 kernel boots with 1GB of memory just fine. It's the "generic" kernel (which is apparently the recommended kernel for i686 processors, having obsoleted the i686 kernel which was in Ubuntu 6.06) which doesn't work with more than 588MB of memory. So if you want to assign more than 588MB of memory to your Ubuntu guess, try the i386 kernel.
