2010-10-16

HOW TO INSTALL VMWARE SERVER 2.0.2 ON FEDORA 13

(UPDATED ON on 2010-11-14: This procedure also works with kernel 2.6.34.7-61)



Hi there,

Having upgraded my F12 box to the latest release I soon found out, like you if you are reading this, that VMWare Server couldn't compile the necessary kernel modules as expected when running /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

After reading a few posts on the net, none of which was a direct solution to my problem, I solved the issue by putting together hints from different blogs.

Here is what I have done, but first of all my setup:

Fedora 13
Kernel 2.6.34.7-56.fc13.x86_64 (64Bit kernel but this should also work on a 32bit)
VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.x86_64



In order for everything to work well you will need the ".tar.gz" version of vmware-server from www.vmware.com (the patch will not work with the .rpm version)

The correct file to download is:

VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.x86_64.tar.gz

You now need to get the patch written by Radu Cotescu (special thanks to Radu for this nice piece of work)
http://codebin.cotescu.com/vmware/vmware-server-2.0.x-kernel-2.6.3x-install.sh

unzip+untar the script, if needed, than make it executable and run it as root


chmod +x vmware-server-2.0.x-kernel-2.6.3x-install.sh

./vmware-server-2.0.x-kernel-2.6.3x-install.sh [PATH_TO_VMWARE_ARCHIVE.tar.gz]


Follow the instructions on screen and you will get stuck when the script invokes vmware-config.pl. for you.

To solve this issue you will need to manually edit the file vmware-config.pl.

Open the vmware-config.pl file in any editor (as long as you do this as root) then search for :

if (-e $answer . ‘/linux/utsrelease.h’) {
$uts_headers .= “#include \n”;

and replace with:

if (-e $answer . ‘/generated/utsrelease.h’) {
$uts_headers .= “#include <./generated/utsrelease.h> \n”;


At this point, run the /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl file and the kernel modules will compile without issues.

I hope this helps you.

QatQat