New Machine - Ubuntu in Parallels Apple Silicon

I need to setup new machine from time to time, and I always forget all the things that need to be set up. So, here it goes. I won’t setup any encryption since I expect MacBook disk itself to be already encrypted.

Parallels

The only way that worked for me is to let Parallels download and install Ubuntu 22.04. Manual installations failed for me:

  • None of the Ubuntu 23.10 ISO arm64 images worked for me - they simply wouldn’t boot.
  • Ubuntu 24.04 ISO arm64 image would install and boot and would work reasonably fast, but not buttery-smooth and parallels guest addons would fail to install (Parallels 19). However, this is the right way to use Ubuntu under UTM with GPU acceleration.
  • Alternatively you can try to install Ubuntu 23.10 server, then install ubuntu-desktop and go through troubleshooting to make desktop work, but I wonder what’s the point since Ubuntu 22.04 works just as good.

UTM

The UTM Ubuntu guide is straightforward - you download the Ubuntu Server ARM64 ISO straight from Canonical and install it. Use Ubuntu 24.04 since it contains newest drivers which will work with UTM 3d-accelerated hardware. Couple of tips:

  • When the installation finishes and you’re asked to reboot the machine, the machine freezes. Just power it down and up again.
  • Before powering the machine up, remove the CD device, so that the VM boots off the hard drive.
  • After installing ubuntu-desktop and rebooting, it can take up to 5 minutes for Ubuntu to boot up, during which the VM will appear frozen. The reason is that systemd-networkd-wait-online.service can wait 90 seconds for network to come up.
  • To speed up the boot, follow the “netplan/NetworkManager” documentation below and nuke that fucking wait service.
  • Before any change done to the VM that might cause the VM not no boot, clone the VM.

OS and Filesystem

When auto-installing, Parallels will create two partitions using the GPT partitioning table: 1GB efi and 64GB ext4. Go with ext4: btrfs uses COW and would most probably balloon the VM disk size much more than ext4. Therefore, let’s use ext4. It will also create a 2G swapfile, you can resize it later.

Name the machine after its expected usage, e.g. mavi-par-experiments or mavi-utm-base.

Post-installation

Enable user-accessible dmesg: edit /etc/sysctl.d/10-kernel-hardening.conf and kernel.dmesg_restrict = 0.

ext4

Enable trim. You need to enable discard for all of your ext4 partitions: simply add the discard option to /etc/fstab. Note that swap on a swap partition will perform discard automatically. Make sure the VM disk supports trim: lsblk --discard should print non-zero value in DISC-GRAN for sda.

Regarding additional fs flags:

  • user_xattr is enabled by default on ext4; check with sudo tune2fs -l /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root and also user_xattr ubuntu forums thread
  • extents - ext4: unknown. There’s no longer a mount option extent or extents, probably they are on by default, but it doesn’t hurt to turn them on via tune2fs -O extents.

Install basic software

sudo apt update
sudo apt -V dist-upgrade
sudo snap refresh
sudo apt install git vim htop fish doublecmd-qt gnome-text-editor libreoffice net-tools curl whois
sudo apt autoremove --purge rhythmbox thunderbird
sudo update-alternatives --config editor     # select vim.basic

Note: install doublecmd-qt rather than doublecmd-gtk since GTK version doesn’t support wayland.

Uninstall gedit:

sudo apt autoremove --purge gedit

gnome keyboard shortcuts

Open “Keyboard Settings” GNOME settings, “View and customize shortcuts”, set:

  • “Launchers” / “Launch Terminal” to ^T
  • Navigation:
    • “Move Window one workspace to the left” set to Shift+Super+Page Up, setting it to the same setting as before. This, for some fucking reason, stops capturing Shift+Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Left from Intellij
    • “Move Window one workspace to the right” set to Shift+Super+Page Down, setting it to the same setting as before.
  • “Windows”:
    • “Hide window”: disabled
    • “Move window”: disabled; you can always move window by Win+left-dragging anywhere within the window
    • “Resize window”: disabled; you can always resize window by Win+middleclick-dragging near appropriate border of the window

I tend to configure Gnome to swap Alt, Ctrl and Meta keys, so that ^ works as Meta, ⌥ works as Alt and ⌘ works as Ctrl in guest. To configure this, follow Mac-like cursor control: Win/Alt/Ctrl scenario.

In order to fix mouse scrolling speed, open gnome-tweaks, “Keyboard & Mouse” and set “Acceleration profile” to “Flat”.

gnome text editor

  • Settings Cog wheel > Show Line numbers
  • Settings Cog wheel > Show Right Margin
  • Settings Cog wheel > disable “Text Wrapping”
  • Settings Cog wheel > disable “Check Spelling”
  • Preferences > Appearance: select 2nd row 2nd column.
  • Preferences > Highlight current line
  • Preferences > Display overview map
  • Preferences > Right margin: set to 120
  • Preferences > Restore Session: disable

fish

chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

To add environment variables, add them at the end of the ~/.config/fish/config.fish file:

export M2_HOME="$HOME/local/apache-maven"
export PATH="$PATH:$M2_HOME/bin"

Firefox

Firefox should run in Wayland mode by default; verify in the about:support page: the “Window Protocol” setting should read “wayland” instead of “xwayland”.

Make sure to disable “smooth scrolling” in settings.

gnome system monitor extension

Follow Install System Monitor Extension To Ubuntu Gnome.

git+sshkey

Create the ~/.gitconfig file:

[user]
  name = Martin Vysny
  email = mavi@vaadin.com
[alias]
  ci = commit
  st = status
[color]
  ui = auto
[push]
  default = current
  followTags = true
  autoSetupRemote = true
[core]
  editor = vim
  autocrlf = input
[merge]
  conflictstyle = diff3

ONLY WHEN NOT IN THE BASE IMAGE (since I want all VMs to have their own ssh keys): Create ssh key & press enter to keep the default settings:

ssh-keygen

Upload the public key to github ssh keys

Double Commander

Go to Configuration:

  • Colors / File Panels / Text Color: black
  • Colors / File types:
    • category name: executable, mask: *, attributes: -*x*, color: Green
    • dir, *, d*, Navy
    • symlink, *, l*, Teal
  • Files views / Files views extra / Show system and hidden files
  • Folder tabs / “Show tab header also when there is only one tab” - uncheck
  • Fonts:
    • Main Font: Ubuntu 11 Regular
    • Viewer font: Ubuntu Mono 13
  • Icons / File panel: 16x16
  • Keys: “Ctrl+Alt+Letters”: None
  • Keys / Hot Keys:
    • cm_RunTerm: F2
    • cm_PackFiles: ⌘P
    • cm_ExtractFiles: ⌘U
    • cm_TargetEqualSource: ⌘=
    • cm_ChangeDirToHome: ` (grave accent)
    • cm_RenameOnly: F9
    • cm_Search: ⇧⌘F
  • Tools / Editor:
    • Use External Program;
    • executable: gnome-text-editor
    • additional parameters: -n

Sort by extension.

MacBook

Follow New MacBook Setup.

Intellij

There’s an IDEA snap for arm64 distro, so you can simply:

$ sudo snap install intellij-idea-ultimate --classic

Login to my user account. To restore settings, follow Sync settings between IDE instances. Make sure to:

  1. overwrite local settings from jetbrains account
  2. disable “sync plugins” - it doesn’t work reliably and would install/uninstall random plugins as I start/stop VMs.

GNOME Settings

Go to Settings. Then:

  • Appearance > Color: select blue
  • Multitasking > Application Switching > Include Apps From Current Workspace only
  • Privacy
    • Location Services > Turn on
    • File History & trash
      • Enable “Automatically Delete Trash Content” and “Automatically Delete Temporary Files”
    • Screen Lock: Blank Screen Display: Never
  • Date & Time: Enable Automatic Time Zone

Software & Updates

Go to the “Updates” tab and set:

  • When there are other updates: Display Immediately
  • Notify me of new Ubuntu version: For LTS only

LTS: the reason is that Parallels only supports Ubuntu 22.04; it shows scary segfaults on Ubuntu 23.10+. Before upgrading to Ubuntu 24.04, I need to test that it’s rock-solid; also this may require Parallels 20+.

Docker

sudo apt install docker.io docker-compose docker-buildx

Add your user to the docker group:

sudo usermod -aG docker parallels

Reboot, and test it out:

docker run --rm -ti ubuntu /bin/bash

Terminal

Set Initial terminal size in the “Profile” setting to 160x50.

netplan/NetworkManager

netplan by default uses systemd.networkd to control network interfaces. Using NetworkManager is much easier though, let’s switch to that (otherwise VPN via NetworkManager will refuse to enable). Edit /etc/netplan/00-installer-config.yaml and add renderer: NetworkManager:

# This is the network config written by 'subiquity'
network:
  ethernets:
    enp0s5:
      dhcp4: true
  version: 2
  renderer: NetworkManager

To prevent 90 second waiting for network to become up, disable systemd-networkd-wait-online.service:

$ systemctl disable systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
$ systemctl mask systemd-networkd-wait-online.service

Scripts

~/shutdown:

#!/bin/bash
set -e -o pipefail
sudo shutdown -h now

~/reboot:

#!/bin/bash
set -e -o pipefail
sudo reboot

~/update:

#!/bin/bash
set -e -o pipefail
sudo apt update
sudo apt -V dist-upgrade
sudo apt autoremove --purge
sudo snap refresh

To run these scripts without needing to type in root password, run sudo visudo and add this line:

parallels ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/apt update, /usr/bin/apt -V dist-upgrade, /usr/bin/snap refresh, /usr/sbin/shutdown -h now, /usr/bin/apt autoremove --purge, /usr/sbin/reboot

~/killintellij:

#!/bin/bash
set -e -o pipefail

echo "Soft-killing IDEA"
killall idea || echo "IDEA not running"
sleep 3
echo "Hard-killing IDEA"
killall -9 idea || echo "IDEA not running"
sleep 3
echo "Deleting cache"
rm -rf .cache/JetBrains

Boot Settings (UTM only)

To see the kernel log on boot: see UTM #6732. In short, edit /etc/default/grub and set GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="noquiet console=tty1 systemd.log_target=kmsg - that will make UTM show the tty1 on boot. If not, press ⌥← or ⌥→ to toggle between tty1, tty2, …, tty12 until you arrive to tty1 and see the boot messages. Don’t forget to run sudo update-grub to write changes done to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable.

Tips: Never use the nomodeset option - the VM no longer initializes the display in UTM and is no longer usable.

Written on March 13, 2024