Following the series about VMware troublesome installation here is a short tip for having VMware Player or Workstation up and running on your linux box.

  1. Download latest patch from the Google VMKernelNewbies Group (currently 117d)
  2. Extract it to some tmp directory
  3. Execute runme.pl

It could not get any easier than this (well maybe VMware can update more often)

Comments

Comment by Peter Nicholls on 2008-08-12 03:29:18 +0300

hi there

i get an error: unable to open the installer database /etc/vmware/locations in read-mode.

what does this mean and how do i solve it?

Cheers

Comment by Peter on 2008-08-12 10:21:50 +0300

I have never run onto such error but here you can find some suggestions:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/266994

Comment by Dario on 2008-09-06 17:14:21 +0300

Thanks a lot, its runs

Comment by Wayne Whitney on 2008-09-15 19:32:14 +0300

The 1.17d patch seems to only work for Workstation 6, does anyone have a solution for Workstation 5.5? With a WS 5.5, I get a version mismatch on vmmon, expected 138 got 168.

Cheers, Wayne

Comment by Stephan Wissel on 2008-09-23 09:00:17 +0300

You would run the patch after a regular VMWare install or on a clean system?

Comment by Peter on 2008-09-23 15:59:08 +0300

@Stephan – If you have installed any VMware products than you do not need the patch. If the installation fails then run the patch and try installing again (however you should try installing first with no patch)

Comment by Thierry on 2008-10-12 22:39:06 +0300

for WS5 have a look at http://www.insecure.ws/2008/07/24/vmware-anspecific-specific-557-and-kernel-2626, works for me

Comment by UNF on 2008-10-25 12:25:46 +0300

hi, I hope somebody can help me with this problem

I am stuck trying to install VMware-Workstation-6.5.0-118166.x86_64.bundle
on Ubuntu 8.10 x64 kernel 2.26-7

When I ran it the installer started and rolled through to about 60% finished, then suddenly reversed out again, giving only the uninformative err msg: “Installation failed”

I then found this page and tried to install the any-any-117d but got the following:

~/vmware-any-any-update117d$ sudo chmod a+x runme.pl
~/vmware-any-any-update117d$ sudo ./runme.pl
Unable to open the installer database /etc/vmware/locations in read-mode.

Execution aborted.

when I check /etc/vmware/ it is empty, except for one ‘config’ file which only contains .encoding = “UTF-8”

so here are my questions:

Q1. Is there a VMlog where I can see exactly what went wrong during the install?

Q2. Is there any particular distro/kernel this VMware version is known to work/not work for?

Q3. Which prerequisite packages need to be installed before this VMware can load/compile?

any assistance appreciated, thanks !

Comment by foxi on 2008-10-27 11:10:37 +0300

Thank you!