As I posted much earlier this morning, my last remaining issue with my upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 Natty to 11.10 Oneiric involved VMWare Workstation 7.1.4 (WS 7.1.4). It would start to compile new kernel modules as it should following a Linux kernel update, but that compilation failed with the very first module – Virtual Machine Manager.
After not finding any answers through Google, I searched and found help on the VMWare Community forum. I found an updated release to WS 7.1.5 which I downloaded and installed. However, it had the same issues as 7.1.4 with Linux kernel 3.0.0-12. Then I found a user in this thread who pointed to the solution at Weltall’s Blog. Weltall created the necessary fixes along with a script to install them. Although targeted for kernel 2.6.39, others commenting on his blog indicated that the patches also worked for 3.0.0.
The script was created to patch WS 7.1.4 and checked the version on execution. Therefore, it wouldn’t run against WS 7.1.5. The solution to that was simple – I just edited the script in a text editor (gedit will work) to change the targeted version number. So, the line near the beginning of the script that says:
vmreqver=7.1.4
should simply be changed to:
vmreqver=7.1.5
Trivial. I ran this script with sudo privileges from a temporary directory and patched the necessary VMWare Workstation 7.1.5:
sudo ./patch-modules_2.6.39.sh
Upon completing the patch process, WS 7.1.5 started up normally and works fine. Problem solved!As far as I know, I’m now fully operational on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric.
Many thanks to Weltall for creating this patch, and to fbb for pointing to it from the VMWare Community forum.
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This is the coolest thing about the Linux community! All that support from all over the place! Thank goodness for geeks who love what they do! They sure make things simple for us “ordinary folk.”
By: Robin Lyndsay Taylor on October 15, 2011
at 1:02 pm
Amen to that! The folks who create these patches are great blessings to the community. Linux seems to attract the best and brightest.
By: reformedmusings on October 15, 2011
at 1:07 pm
after downloading the patch, and making the changes, I ran it, nothing seemed to happen. So I tried running VMWare again, and it did not even try to compile the kernel mods, just loaded VMware, then when I try to start a VM up it errors that the kernel mods are not available.
Got any other tips?
running the patch again just returns “patch already applied”
By: finndo on October 16, 2011
at 4:58 pm
When I ran the script in the terminal, it replaced some files (backed up old ones and copied new ones) and compiled all the kernel modules. Like in your case, Workstation started right up when I ran it. I only ran one of my VMs, and it worked fine.
You might try reinstalling Workstation over itself from the bundle, then delete the backup files from the script and reapply the patch. That’s probably the first thing that I’d do.
By: reformedmusings on October 16, 2011
at 5:32 pm
this is what I am getting now:
———————————————————————-
user@hostname:/usr/lib/vmware/modules$ sudo ./vmware2.6.39fixedv3.patch
./vmware2.6.39fixedv3.patch: 2: —: not found
./vmware2.6.39fixedv3.patch: 3: +++: not found
./vmware2.6.39fixedv3.patch: 4: @@: not found
./vmware2.6.39fixedv3.patch: 5: Syntax error: “(” unexpected
———————————————————————-
here is a list of the directory I am running it from:
/usr/lib/vmware/modules
———————————————————————-
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 2011-10-16 18:22 ./
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 2011-10-16 18:02 ../
drwxr-xr-x 105 root root 12288 2011-10-16 12:56 binary/
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 624 2011-10-16 12:56 modules.xml
drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 2011-10-16 18:22 source/
drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 2011-10-16 18:21 source-orig/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-10-16 12:56 source-workstation7.1.5-2011-10-16-17:07:50-backup/
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8998 2011-10-16 18:03 vmware2.6.39fixedv3.patch*
———————————————————————-
source and source-orig are identical:
———————————————————————-
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 2011-10-16 17:07 .patched
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-10-16 18:06 patching/
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2011-09-23 22:44 vmblock-only/
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 757760 2011-10-16 17:07 vmblock.tar
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 2011-09-23 22:44 vmci-only/
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 788480 2011-10-16 17:07 vmci.tar
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 2011-09-23 22:44 vmmon-only/
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 1249280 2011-10-16 17:07 vmmon.tar
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-10-16 17:07 vmnet-only/
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 870400 2011-10-16 17:07 vmnet.tar
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2011-09-23 22:44 vsock-only/
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 942080 2011-10-16 17:07 vsock.tar
———————————————————————-
any thoughts? I thought I’d ask here, since the posts were most recent, and you must know what you did…
By: finndo on October 16, 2011
at 5:40 pm
All I did was change the version number in the script and run it as indicated in the post above. However, I ran the script from a temp directory on my /home partition to which I have total rw rights. I don’t know that would make any difference, though, since the script is run as sudo. I really didn’t leave any steps out of the original post.
By: reformedmusings on October 16, 2011
at 6:01 pm
I have it working now, what I needed to do was:
copy the script and the patch to:
/usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
and run it from there.
after that VMware would run, but would error that the kernel modules were not loaded when trying to power on a VM. I had to run
sudo vmware-modconfig –install-all –console
which gave me a lot of errors like this one (which I did not have before, fyi I had to wipe my HDD and reinstall after I screwed up my video drivers so bad I could no longer boot…)
(vmware-installer.py:14345): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: “pixmap”,
I tried a sudo apt-get install pixman, and it actually installed something, but the error did not go away.
Everything is running now, although I never resolved the pixman issue and I know I did not have it before…
Thank you for your help.
I never understood why programs don’t put warnings and messages of “unsupported configuration” into their code, and stop BLOCKING users from installing applications when version numbers do not match what existed when they wrote the code…
By: finndo on October 23, 2011
at 9:13 am
Wow, you really had a pile of issues. I’m glad that you’re operational now. Your gtk warning isn’t unique to you. It’s apparently a known issue. Try the fix suggested at this post on launchpad to see if that solves the issue.
By: reformedmusings on October 23, 2011
at 2:09 pm
Thank you a lot! I can still run my VMWare workstation now!
By: histoiresdemoi on October 22, 2011
at 5:44 pm
You’re welcome! Thanks for stopping by.
By: reformedmusings on October 22, 2011
at 5:55 pm
[...] Fixing VMWare Workstation 7.14 and 7.15 in Ubuntu 11.10 with kernel 3.0.0-12 [...]
By: Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric upgrade thoughts « Reformed Musings on October 25, 2011
at 2:11 pm
I have applied the patch on vmware workstation 7.14 and then upgraded to vmware 7.15 and the modified sources were overwritten.
So I had to reapply the patch (changing the version as you said) _and_ remove the “/usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/.patched” (the existence of this file prevented the reapply of the patch).
By: Cătălin Moraru on October 30, 2011
at 6:34 am
Thanks for stopping by and offering that very helpful hint!
By: reformedmusings on October 30, 2011
at 7:33 am
Excellent! Thanks a lot!
By: kto on October 31, 2011
at 4:49 am
[...] http://reformedmusings.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/fixing-vmware-workstation-7-14-and-7-15-in-ubuntu-11… [...]
By: VMWare et ubuntu 11.10 on November 18, 2011
at 11:36 am