Lethe's Ccielogs

Hello all, I’m posting this because when I migrated my home systems to latest Red Hat distribution, Fedora 10, I’ve faced a few problems during the VMware Workstation installation, this is due to a problem during compilation of kernel modules needed by VMware software so I hope this will help anyone having similar problems.

Here we go. VMware engineers really did a great job in enhancing VMware Workstation’s installations routines for us Linux users all you need to do is to make sure you have all the dependencies installed  (kernel-devel and gcc) and the rest is up to the installer script.

Tonight after I installed VMware Workstation without any error I tried to launch it both via the GUI both with the VMware command from bash but all I got was an error saying :

Logging to /tmp/vmware-root/setup-5583.log
modinfo: could not find module vmmon
modinfo: could not find module vmnet
modinfo: could not find module vmblock
modinfo: could not find module vmci
modinfo: could not find module vsock
modinfo: could not find module vmmon
modinfo: could not find module vmnet
modinfo: could not find module vmblock
modinfo: could not find module vmci
modinfo: could not find module vsock

Even if I did not get any error during installation, I digged through VmWare communities and found a similar problem with early fedora 10 betas, basically this is a segmentation fault problem that has cropped up in VMware Workstation 6.5 when running on F10 Beta and later. Workstation 6.5 segfaults when configuring modules and because of the way I was launching VmWare  segmentation fault error was being suppressed.

The vmware-config.pl script has been incorporated into the installation routine so you can’t issue it via command line anymore, but VmWare won’t remove this without replacing it with something else (they’re not Microsoft ) so you can issue the following command to force the reconfiguration and  reinstallation of kernel modules :

vmware-modconfig –console –install-all

This will make the actual seg-fault error show up now simply issue :

mv /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary.old (or whatever name you prefer, this is just to rename the binary directory to something else).

Now everything should be fixed and you can issue again :

vmware-modconfig –console –install-all

And finally your VMware modules will be compiled and correctly installed and you’ll have a full working VMware workstation I love Linux ’cause everything is so easy and smooth!

Happy virtualization and thanks for reading, Lethe.