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[LUG] VMWare Workstation Fix

 

Just posting this in case anyone else runs into it.

If any of you have the misfortune to have to use VMWare Workstation
you'll probably be familiar with the fix patches distributed from here:
http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/

In short, VMWare are completely incompetent and their flagship
Workstation product (as well as the free Player tool) routinely fail to
compile the necessary kernel modules to run after install on any vaguely
modern kernel, and I really do mean, every single time. On all distros,
and on pretty much every kernel you'll have to find the correct patch,
modify it to your kernel revision and cross your fingers. Recently even
the patches haven't been working as VMWare have broken their bootstrap
utility so it will complain about not finding your (completely validly)
installed linux-headers package. By some miracle I've just found and
tested a proposed fix, and it works.

My tested workstation is running Ubuntu 12.10 64bit with a variety of
3.7 kernels and VMWare Workstation 9.0.1 build-894247 (both fully up to
date). Amazingly, the fix was:

root@failbot:~$ uname -r
3.7.0-7-generic
root@failbot:~$ ln -s
/usr/src/linux-headers-3.7.0-7-generic/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h
/usr/src/linux-headers-3.7.0-7-generic/include/linux/version.h

After that VMWare started, compiled it's needed modules and ran straight
away. I really don't know how they get away with shipping such crap,
I've wasted so much time fixing this exact issue on every single release
for years.

Hope this may help any other frustrated users.

Regards

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