Installing VMware Workstation 9.0.2 on Fedora 19

Posted by KarimElatov on August 15, 2013 Leavea comment (0) Goto comments

I ran into some issues setting up my VMware Workstation on my Fedora 19 install, so I decided to put together all the notes on how I got around them.

VMware WorkStation Installer

After you have downloaded the installer from VMware, you will see the following in your downloads folder:

elatov@kmac:~/downloads$ls | grep Work
VMware-Workstation-Full-9.0.2-1031769.x86_64.txt

Make the file executable and runthe installer with sudo:

elatov@kmac:~/downloads$sudo ./VMware-Workstation-Full-9.0.2-1031769.x86_64.txt 
Extracting VMware Installer...done.
You must accept the VMware OVF Tool component for Linux End User
License Agreement to continue.  Press Enter to proceed.
..
..
Installing VMware Workstation 9.0.2
    Configuring...
[######################################################################] 100%
Installation was successful.

Compile the VMware Workstation Kernel Modules

Before we do that, let’s install all the necessary pre-requisites:

elatov@kmac:~$sudo yum install kernel-headers gcc kernel-devel

After those are installed, try to compile the kernel modules with the following command:

elatov@kmac:~$sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

Initially my compile failed with the following error messages:

/tmp/modconfig-c2Eiux/vmnet-only/hub.c:366:28: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type
             jack->procEntry->read_proc = VNetHubProcRead;
                            ^
/tmp/modconfig-c2Eiux/vmnet-only/hub.c:367:28: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type
             jack->procEntry->data = jack;
..
..
/tmp/modconfig-c2Eiux/vmnet-only/bridge.c: In function ‘VNetBridge_Create’:
/tmp/modconfig-c2Eiux/vmnet-only/bridge.c:331:34: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type
       bridge->port.jack.procEntry->read_proc = VNetBridgeProcRead;
                                  ^
/tmp/modconfig-c2Eiux/vmnet-only/bridge.c:332:34: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type
       bridge->port.jack.procEntry->data = bridge;
                                  ^
make[2]: *** [/tmp/modconfig-c2Eiux/vmnet-only/bridge.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/modconfig-c2Eiux/vmnet-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/3.10.4-300.fc19.x86_64'
make: *** [vmnet.ko] Error 2

Doing some research I ran into this VMware communities page. Which, in turn, led me to this Arch Linux page. From that page:

VMwaremodule patches and installation
VMware Workstation 9 and Player 5 both support kernels up to 3.9. Any later requires patching of the VMware modules.

3.10 kernels
The call create_proc_entry() has been dropped from 3.10 in favor of proc_create(). This requires patching of the vmblock and vmnet modules that use them. The patches (including the optional fuse patch) can be found here and here:

$ cd /tmp
$ curl -O http://pkgbuild.com/git/aur-mirror.git/plain/vmware-patch/vmblock-9.0.2-5.0.2-3.10.patch
$ curl -O http://pkgbuild.com/git/aur-mirror.git/plain/vmware-patch/vmnet-9.0.2-5.0.2-3.10.patch
$ cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
$ tar -xvf vmblock.tar
$ tar -xvf vmnet.tar
$ patch -p0 -i /tmp/vmblock-9.0.2-5.0.2-3.10.patch
$ patch -p0 -i /tmp/vmnet-9.0.2-5.0.2-3.10.patch
$ tar -cf vmblock.tar vmblock-only
$ tar -cf vmnet.tar vmnet-only
$ rm -r vmblock-only
$ rm -r vmnet-only
$ vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

And I was running Kernel 3.10:

elatov@kmac:~$uname -r
3.10.5-201.fc19.x86_64

Similar patches can be found here and here.After I ran the above commands to apply the patches, the compile went through.

Entering the License Number

At this point I ran vmware from the command line and workstation started up fine. I wanted to enter my license key since the trial only runs for 30 days. I went to Help -> “Enter License Key..” and I saw the following:

I would click on “Enter License Key..” but nothing would happen. I found two sites that ran into the same issue:

• Can’tadd serial code/activate VMware in Ubuntu 13.04

• Fix:Unable to click on Enter license key for VMWare Workstation

Both listed a fix, you can either run this:

$ sudo /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx --new-sn KEY

or you can run this:

$ sudo /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-enter-serial

The latter will launch a GUI,and you can enter the key into it. I used the first method and it worked without an issue.

Launch the VMware WorkStation Virtual Network Editor

I tried to run the Virtual Network Editor from the VMware WorkStation but it wouldn’t do anything. I checked out dmesg and I saw the following:

elatov@kmac:~$dmesg -T | tail -1
[Wed Aug 14 18:51:11 2013] vmware-gksu[6702]: segfault at 7fd0bfda24ab ip 00007fd0c4615196 sp 00007fff8df1f608 error 4 in libc-2.17.so[7fd0c44e4000+1b5000]

It looks like vmware-gksuis crashing. vmware-gksu is a utility that comeswith workstation and it’s gui to alleviate user’s privileges(kind of like sudo). Also checking out theapplication logs (under /tmp) I saw the following:

elatov@kmac:/tmp/vmware-elatov$tail vmware-apploader-9319.log
2013-08-14T19:07:48.046-07:00| appLoader| I120: GLib: glib_minor_version: Comparing 36 with 36
2013-08-14T19:07:48.046-07:00| appLoader| I120: libglib-2.0.so.0 validator returned true.
2013-08-14T19:07:48.046-07:00| appLoader| I120: Marking libglib-2.0.so.0 node as SYSTEM.
2013-08-14T19:07:48.046-07:00| appLoader| I120: -- Finished processing libglib-2.0.so.0 --
2013-08-14T19:07:48.046-07:00| appLoader| I120: Marking libgksu2.so.0 node as SHIPPED.
2013-08-14T19:07:48.046-07:00| appLoader| I120: Marking libgtop-2.0.so.7 node as SHIPPED.
2013-08-14T19:07:48.046-07:00| appLoader| I120: Marking libXau.so.6 node as SYSTEM.
2013-08-14T19:07:48.689-07:00| appLoader| W110: Child process was terminated with signal 11.
2013-08-14T19:07:48.689-07:00| appLoader| W110: Unable to load dependencies for /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libvmware-gksu.so/libvmware-gksu.so
2013-08-14T19:07:48.689-07:00| appLoader| W110: Unable to execute /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-gksu.

It saw showing the same issue,vmware-gksu was having issues. From the segfaultwe can see that we are having an issue with libc. I found a lot of people mentioning that there are a lot of bugs with vmware-gksu and libc. Here is one example. Manually elevating my privileges with sudo worked for me. So I ran this:

elatov@kmac:~$sudo vmware-netcfg

and then I saw the following:

I was able to make all the changes that I needed.