Monday, February 11, 2013

Getting VMware player to work on Fedora 17/18 (Updated)

Update:
 When i wrote this post i was using F17 and 3.7ish~ kernels. By the time i switched to F18 (and 3.8 kernels) another issue came up saying it wasn't possible to rebuild the VMCI module. Fortunately there is a way to fix it, not easy as the one i commented before but still. First you need to run our previous bug fix:

cp -rp /usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/include/linux/

Now basically you need to patch your player sources:
  • cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
  • May want to backup the vmci.tar file just in case
  • tar -xf vmci.tar
  • cd vmci-only
  • Download the patch
  • patch -p1 < 'filenameujustdownloaded.diff'
  • cd ..
  • tar -cf vmci.tar vmci-only/
  • vmware-modconfig --console --install-all
  • rm -rf vmci-only/
After all that your Player should be ready to run, good luck :)

After update my Fedora 17 desktop to the newest kernel (by this time) i realized my VMWare player was broken.

If you been a VMPlayer user for a while you may noted that every time the kernel is updated our player re-compiles his own modules.
The issue with this particular version is a missing version.h on the sources files. Fortunately this file can be found on one of the internal folders and can be copied over to fix this issue:
cp -rp /usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/include/linux/
Source

ps: remember that you probably have more than one kernel version after the update, if you don't want to use this fix just reboot your computer and pick the previous one.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

How to install Node.js in Fedora 17

Update: NodeJS is now part of Fedora as a stable package; so all you need to do to install it is:
$ yum install nodejs
Node currently is begin added/implemented on Fedora 18 and will be part of Fedora 19. If you want to try it out this may work for you:
sudo yum --enablerepo=updates-testing install nodejs
Besides that, I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like to get involved with experimental stuff or mess with my os regular install (and i currently have F17 on my notebook and work pc), so this is what i did:

First make sure you have a few devel packages that you'll need:

$ sudo yum install openssl-devel.i686 gcc gcc-c++

Download the source files (you can get the lastest version link from Node's homepage)

$ wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.8.18/node-v0.8.18.tar.gz

Once it finish, zunip and compile it (it may take a while depending on your computer)
$ tar zxvf node-v0.8.18.tar.gz
$ cd node-v0.8.18
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

After that you can start using node!:

$ node -v
v0.8.18