Dropbear

VMware Player on Debian

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For various reasons, having vmware running on my desktop would be kind of useful.  VMware provide a Free (as in beer) version of their software called VMware Player. I downloaded the file VMware-Player-4.0.2-591240.x86_64.bundle off their website and tried to build it.

It failed to build. Given my previous lack of success with VMware server, I wasn’t too surprised.  What was surprising was it wasn’t too hard to fix it.  The problem was that the vmnet module would not compile and that was due to three things:

  • net device ops no longer has set_multicast_list (in netif.c)
  • the linux module header needs to be included to define THIS_MODULE
  • skb_frag_t has been redefined and needs an adjustment

The patch is only a few lines and means I can compile vmware on my Debian sid computer running kernel 3.2.0-1

vmnet.patch

To use it, you will need to find where the modules are built, for me it is /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source

  1. mv vmnet.tar vmnet2.tar
  2. tar xf vmnet2.tar
  3. patch -p0 < vmnet.patch
  4. tar cf vmnet.tar vmnet-only

With that you can run the player which will try to build the modules and you’re done!

 

 

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Comments

12 responses to “VMware Player on Debian”

  1. bharath Avatar
    bharath

    also see this post http://tech2copycat.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/have-you-ever-t/

    Reply
  2. Ben Hutchings Avatar
    Ben Hutchings

    Your patch breaks multicast and promiscuous mode.
    You need to s/ndo_set_multicast_list/ndo_set_rx_mode/.

    Reply
    1. Craig Avatar
      Craig

      ndo_set_multicast_list is assigned to VmNetifSetMulticast() is an empty function. So I think for this specific case, we’re safe. I’ve seen other examples of similiar code and they removed the function like what I did too.

      But perhaps we (those that have done it that way) are all collectively doing the wrong thing too!

      Reply
  3. Kai Hendry Avatar
    Kai Hendry

    As a long time VMware user who has recently switched to Virtualbox, I suggest you do the same. 🙂

    Reply
    1. Craig Avatar
      Craig

      Ooh, care to explain why? I’m not challenging your suggestion just curious about the reasons behind that; besides not having to do evil patches like my blog entry describes.

      Reply
  4. Scott Busby Avatar
    Scott Busby

    Worked perfect on my Debian Testing system!
    Linux kernel 3.2.0-1-686-pae

    Thanks for the patch.

    Scott

    Reply
  5. re7erse Avatar
    re7erse

    did not work for me:

    /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source# patch -p1 < vmnet.patch
    can’t find file to patch at input line 4
    Perhaps you used the wrong -p or –strip option?

    The text leading up to this was:

    |diff -u vmnet-only.orig/filter.c vmnet-only/filter.c
    |— vmnet-only.orig/filter.c 2012-01-19 09:22:02.000000000 +1100

    |+++ vmnet-only/filter.c 2012-02-16 21:03:24.000000000 +1100

    File to patch:

    Reply
    1. Craig Avatar
      Craig

      As the error message says, you used (and I told everyone) the wrong -p option.
      The correct command is patch -p0 < vmnet.patch so just change the “1” for “0” and you should be right to go.

      Reply
  6. mr_me Avatar
    mr_me

    works perfect! thanks 🙂

    Reply
  7. brett h Avatar
    brett h

    these are the reasons i quit VMWare for VirtualBox a few years ago…. only problem is it’s very difficult to get a laptop to share USB devices with the vm, particularly a wireless Alfa card running on a Mac. ill send you a driver once i figure out how to build it!

    Reply
  8. Agustin Vazquez Avatar
    Agustin Vazquez

    Tanks a lot i had the same problem and i’ven fixed all becaouse of you.

    Reply
    1. Craig Avatar
      Craig

      Glad that it worked out for you! I got a little of the way forward by reading other blogs so figured it might help others; or me when I need to do it again and forget what I did.

      Reply

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