UnderworldLabs.org

Well after some serious stuffing about i finally gave up on vmware. My latest kernel upgrade to 2.6.26.x just wouldn’t play nice regardless of what i did. Advice was sought from relevant places to no avail – even though the number of people with a similar issue was (is) growing. A colleague with an identical issue upgraded to the vmware 2 release candidate and the issue was not noticed there.  There was no inclination to go down that road – its a 450MB+ download, runs in a browser window, and looks like a rather bloated setup compared to the 1.x releases  No problem though as i’ve discovered VirtualBox.

After a little bit of stuffing around to get the bridge networking up and running (vmware did this for you on startup quite nicely), i’m all good now with a couple of guest operating systems installed and running with no issue. Some useful docs and info for setting up with Debian can be found on the Debian Virtual Box wiki here. A huge plus is also that it comes with a neat script to build the vbox module for the running kernel.

Overall, so far VirtualBox is more than a suitable replacement for vmware. Give it a shot if you haven’t already.

Perhaps a recurring theme…

In any case take a look here: http://groups.google.com/group/vmkernelnewbies/web/how-to-install-vmware-in-2-6-26-linux-kernel

Theres a new vmware-any-any patch that fixes the build error under kernel 2.6.26.

I recently upgraded my kernel from 2.6.24.4 to 2.6.25.1. In trying to rebuild vmware server against the new kernel, i came up with a few issues.

A bit of digging uncovered this: http://lenrek.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/vmware-105-and-kernel-2625/. It got me up and running quite nicely.

Small point to note – i used to apply the vmware-any-any-update-116 patch and then run /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl. Patches for the 2.6.25 kernel do not apply to a patched vmware-server install. i ran without the any-any patch and all worked fine nonetheless.

Finally, as i normally do i executed the following to ensure correct operation of the console:

cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0
mv libpng12.so.0 libpng12.so.0.old
ln -sf /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 libpng12.so.0
cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.old
ln -sf /lib/libgcc_s.so.1