Friday, October 28, 2011

VMWare Player on Fedora 16

I have some VMWare VM's I've been using here and there. I probably should convert them to Virtual Box, but I've had a rough time getting that working as well.

So ... every time you upgrade the kernel, VMWare barfs because kernel headers have changed. Usually I look around for patches to the VMWare sources, but this time there were none I could find, so I figured it was my turn.

This simple patch makes VMWare Player 4.0.0 work with Linux 3.1.0. At least it seems to work. What I did to patch it in:

$ mkdir /tmp/vmware
$ cd /tmp/vmware
$ wget http://thewalter.net/stef/misc/vmnet-4.0.0-linux-3.1.0.patch
$ tar -xvf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar
$ patch -p0 < vmnet-4.0.0-linux-3.1.0.patch
$ sudo cp /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar.bak
$ sudo tar -cvf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar vmnet-only

And then run vmplayer and let it do its install thing. It says that the services fail to start (systemd incompatibility), but it works regardless.

Note: If you try this and it doesn't work for you (or makes your doggy sad), don't complain to me. Complain to VMWare.
Posted by Stef at 12:32 PM
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10 comments:

  2. Kudos...it worked like a charm, Thanks a lot!!!

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  3. Marvellous! That's exactly the information I needed :-)

    Thanks for a very timely blog post.

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  4. Thank you! That fixed the problem all the old solutions on adding compat_sched.h didn't.

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  5. Thank you!!! it fix vmnet problem....

    ReplyDelete

  6. Marvellous! That's exactly the information I needed :-)
    But ....... it wasn't all informations I needed

    Your scripts don't work with fedora 16 because ...
    vmplayer build modules only until fedora 13

    So I have added a row at your script.

    Before I catched the version of my system in this way:
    uname -rv

    3.1.0-7.fc16.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Nov 1 21:10:48 UTC 2011

    After this I just copy the last fedora modules tree in a new directory, with name matching the version of OS

    So, I append this row:

    cp -r ./vmware-player-app/lib/modules/binary/bld-2.6.33.3-85.fc13-x86_64smp-Fedora13
    ./vmwks/vmware-player-app/lib/modules/binary/bld-3.1.0.7.fc16-x86_64smp-Fedora16

    Works! And also I haven't any error about services startup!

    Thanks Guy !

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  7. Thank you sir, I wish VMWare would figure out how to make player work with Fedora. Had to do something similar with Fedora 15 as well.

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  8. I spent a lot of time today trying to get Vmware to run on my new fedora system. I wish I found your patch sooner! Thanks! Worked great!!

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  9. I spent much time trying to get VMware Workstation malfunction me in my fedora 16! Thanks! It worked great!

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  10. Hello,

    I would really appreciate if you post the entire installation of VMware on Fedora 16. I followed your instruction but can not find vmnet.tar file in the 4th step.

    Thanks, I am linux newbie

    ReplyDelete

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