Fedora Core 6 and VMware

[ianw1974]

Found this problem yesterday after upgrading my system from Fedora 5 to Fedora 6.

 

Basically, what happens is you get a kernel which has been built for i586, and the kernel-devel package that is installed is for i686. Because of this, vmware complains that it cannot run vmware-config.pl correctly and therefore the end result is you cannot use vmware.

 

I found the way to resolve it was this.

 

rpm -e kernel-devel

 

to remove the i686 kernel-devel package. You cannot use yum to install the kernel-devel for i586, I've tried this. I even tried this to try and get the kernel.i686 installed, but this said everything was installed, just like if you try and get the kernel-devel.i586 too. So the way I did it was download it from a Fedora mirror, here is a direct link:

 

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedo...98.fc6.i586.rpm

 

then install using:

 

rpm -Uvh kernel-devel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.i586.rpm

 

of course, you could always just download and install the i686 kernel, reboot and use this new kernel - but this way is quicker ;). Anyway, after this, you need to do the following:

 

ln -s /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-i586 /usr/src/linux

 

to create the symlink ready for vmware-config.pl. Now, we also need to do this:

 

cp /usr/src/linux/include/config/i2o/config.h /usr/src/linux/include/linux/

 

config.h has been deprecated in later kernels, but vmware-config.pl is still looking for it. Alternatively, this should also do it:

 

touch /usr/src/linux/include/linux/config.h

 

and then, just do:

 

vmware-config.pl

 

and configure vmware normally as to how you like it.

[jlc]

If you use VMWare Server this is all you have to do.

 

cd /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-x86_64/include/linux
ln -s configfs.h config.h

[ianw1974]

Just found recently after a new install of Fedora 6, that this no longer seems to be needed, although I had to download the vmware-any-any-update105.tar.gz file to get it working this time around.

[jlc]

I haven't looked at the vmware-any-any yet, but Petr probably just included it do check and then add it if it isn't there.

[ianw1974]

I tried before the patch, and it didn't complain about this file, just something else. I manually created the config.h like I did before, and it didn't resolve the problem. So I figured something else must have happened that was causing the issue, so I applied this patch and hey presto, it all worked.

 

Bizarre! :)