This wasn’t as easy as it should have been. FC6 isn’t generally considered to be a newbie-centric distro, I just wonder if the folks over at Fedora just want to hammer that fact home.
There are some problems when installing VMware server on FC. Firstly, there’s the 2.6.18 kernel, it seems that config.h was removed from the source. This is a file needed by some programs at compile time. If the file doesn’t exist, the compilation can’t complete. I’m guessing that VMware will just need to update its build script for 2.6.18+ kernels. That one can’t be blamed on Fedora, it’s a change in the kernel and I expect the VMware installer to account for the change in a future version.
This one I blame on Fedora, my understanding of the problem is that the installed kernel is based on i586 architecture but the kernel-devel package is based on i686. If you install kernel-devel from the Fedora repos and want to use VMware, you can just forget about it. The fact that the kernel and dev packages are out of sync will prevent the installer from creating the appropriate (and necessary) modules. Does this make sense? Is this something that shouldn’t surprise me? I really don’t understand the logic behind this and any info that you could give me would be greatly appreciated.
Anyway, after some googling, I was able to work around the problem.
Firstly make sure you’re running the latest Fedora kernel, open a terminal session and enter uname -r. At the time of this writing, the latest version is 2.6.18-1.2849.fc6. If you’re running an older kernel, perform an su -c ‘yum update’ before continuing. You will need to restart your computer after installing the latest kernel.
Before going any further, I should tell you that I have SElinux disabled on my box. I don’t know the first thing about managing a machine with SElinux. If you have it on, you may have to do some additional googling to get things working properly.
Download the VMware Server for Linux TAR Binary installer from http://www.vmware.com/download/server/. While your there you should also register to receive your serial number (it is required to complete the install of VMware Server). Once ready, open a terminal session and extract the tarball.
tar -xzvf VMware-server-1.0.1-29996.tar.gz
Download the i586 kernel-devel package from the updates repo and install it:
wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/kernel-devel-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6.i586.rpm
su -c ‘rpm -ivh kernel-devel-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6.i586.rpm’
Create a symbolic link to the headers directory in /usr/src/
su -c ‘ln -s /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-i586/ /usr/src/linux’
I got the fix for the config.h problem from this post on VMTN
su -c ‘cp -v /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-i586/include/config/i2o/config.h /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-i586/include/linux/’
Here’s where things start to work as expected. You need to install GCC and xinetd
su -c ‘yum install xinetd gcc’
Now start the installation; accepting the default answers to all of the questions (save for the location of the kernel headers, see below) is a perfectly acceptable way to get VMware Server installed.
cd ~/vmware-server-distrib/
su -c ./vmware-install.pl
Important: When asked for the headers, make sure the path is /usr/src/linux/include
Notes:
Since Fedora installs and enables a firewall by default you won’t need to worry about unauthorized users connecting to your VMware server.
If you’re reading this after a newer kernel has been released, you’ll need to change any instance of 2.6.18-1.2849.fc6.i586 to whatever kernel revision you’re working with.
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