28 Apr 2007

Using vmware-server-kernel-modules in Ubuntu

In the lastest version of Ubuntu (version 7.04 – Feisty Fawn) kernel modules for VMware Server is available in the package vmware-server-kernel-modules from Ubuntus package repository. The VMware Server itself is at the moment not. You still need to install VMware Server from the tar.gz download from www.vmware.com.

I found documentation on how to make the VMware server kernel modules package work together with the VMware Server installed from tar.gz in the Ubuntu Documentation. I also found the reference to this documentation on the Ubuntu Forums.

The cool thing about this is that you don’t need to run vmware-config.pl every time you update your kernel.

If you upgraded to 7.04 from a previous version of Ubuntu you might run into a problem where you can’t get the vmware console to start. The output on the console will look something like this:

/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0: no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)

I solved it by removing the following packages:

 sudo apt-get --purge remove libdbus-1-2 libnautilus-burn3

Don’t worry new packages have taken their spots as far as I know:

libdbus-1-3
libnautilus-burn4

I found a thread on the VMware forums but my solution seemed easier