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.