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
To use it, you will need to find where the modules are built, for me it is /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
- mv vmnet.tar vmnet2.tar
- tar xf vmnet2.tar
- patch -p0 < vmnet.patch
- tar cf vmnet.tar vmnet-only
With that you can run the player which will try to build the modules and you’re done!
Related articles
- imabonehead: Cross-compiling VMWare View for ARM Linux (in Debian/Ubuntu) | CNXSoft – Embedded Software Development (cnx-software.com)
- Virtually Run Another OS in your System (tech2copycat.wordpress.com)
- Upgrade to Oneiric breaks VMWare Player (aslakjohansen.wordpress.com)
