Running VMware Player on Linux (xubuntu Hardy Heron)

A new article since a long time. Sorry, I was and still am very busy on my job but I need to write these lines first.

Since last month I modified my main development system a little bit and instead of running a native Windows operating system I gave xubuntu 7.10 a try. For developing purposes I installed VMware Player and therefore run virtual machines with Windows XP and Windows Vista. That's way more practical then a multiboot system. By the way, you can do this as well under Windows directly and use Microsoft Virtual PC instead of VMware, too.

As said, I started with xubuntu 7.10 and upgraded recently to 8.04 (Hardy Heron). Everything went smooth but VMware Player didn't start anymore. Fine, as VMware comes with predefined kernel modules which none of them fits for kernel version 2.6.24-16-generic you have to initiate the compile process yourself. No problem at all. Well, in general...

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Sadly, the compile did not finish and interrupted with an error message according to a wrongly included header file. So, I looked around a bit and found a nice step-by-step guide on the VMware website to get it up and running. Here are the steps:

• cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
• cp vmmon.tar vmmon.tar.orig
• sudo tar xvf vmmon.tar
• cd vmmon-only/include/
• sudo nano vcpuset.h (or use any other editor you prefer)
  
• change line 74 from: #include "asm/bitops.h" to: #include "linux/bitops.h"
• rm vmmon.tar (return to the folder where you decompressed the tar file)
• sudo tar cvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only/
• sudo rm -rf vmmon-only/
• sudo vmware-config.pl

If you try to install a fresh tarball of VMware Player then the path to the vmmon.tar archive varies depending on your download.

• cd <path/to/your/dir>/vmware-player-distrib/lib/modules/source/

The modification is the same but the last steps differ:

• cd ../../../
  
• sudo ./vmware-install.pl
  

This process should work for VMware Server and Workstation as well.