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ubuntu / VMplayer note
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Those of you who have one of the Ubuntus and have had to install VMplayer from source know the pain. You have to make sure you get the latest source plus the patch.
The additional fun, as I discovered recently, comes with each kernel(?) update: VMplayer breaks. It simply won’t run.
The fix, which I discovered strictly by accident (last anyone think I’m an expert), is that you run vmplayer-config.pl (sudo) and accept all defaults. It will recompile itself and you’ll once again have a working VMplayer (at least until the next update).
Happy virtual machining!
One Comment
JP
June 20th, 2008
at 12:56pm
I prefer the also free VMware server as it has many more features including the ability to trivially create new VMs and to have the VM running when you are not logged into the GUI and running the GUI VM Player.
For Ubuntu Hardy, you’ll probably also need the “vmware-any-any-update” patch (Google it) and to symlink some libs, per http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4357442&postcount=10
sudo ln -sf /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0
.
And all of this will only work if you’ve installed some additional packages.
DON’T installed them via the `uname -r` hack, that’ll only work once. Do it the right way and use the proper meta-packages:
aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-generic
(or linux-headers-server if you’re using that)
Once that stuff is all done, then every time you do a kernel upgrade you have to do the ’sudo vmplayer-config.pl’ thing as you noted. Yup, it’s a pain, but once you get it all set up it’s not all that bad.