Installing VMware
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VMware installs on Arch Linux pretty well, but its not totally straight forward.
[edit] Installation
You can use the AUR or manually install VMware Server downloaded from VMware.com. This guide shows you how to install the manually downloaded VMware server tarball, assuming you are running Voodoo or newer (Duke) with kernel version 2.6.20+ 32-bit.
[edit] Requirements:
- Root access. Either 'sudo' or 'su'. For this guide, I will be using 'sudo'.
- Xinetd is installed, up and running.
- The X-libraries libxtst, libxt and libxrender installed
- VMware server tarball; latest is 1.0.4 build 56528 as of this writing.
-
VMware server any-to-any" patch: mirror 1 and mirror 2. Note: For server 1.0.4 build 56528 you need patch vmware-any-any-update113.tar.bz2, which is on mirror 1 only. - UPDATE: With 2.6.24 you need this patch (vmware-any-any-update115a.tgz)
- UPDATE: With 2.6.25 you need also this patch (vmware-any-any-update-117-very-ALPHA)
- Compatible with VMware Workstation >= 6.0.2 Build 59824 on Linux 2.6.25
- UPDATE: With 2.6.26 you need this patch (vmware-any-any-update117d.tar.gz), the VMware version 6.0.5 doesn't need the patch, the version for vmmon e.g. in 117d is even too old (168, need 169!)
[edit] Instructions:
- Run sudo mkdir -p /etc/rc.d/vmware.d/rc{0,1,2,3,4,5,6}.d to create VMware runlevel directories.
- Run sudo ln -s /bin/lsmod /sbin/ to create symlink for lsmod.
- Extract VMware server tarball somewhere... i.e. /tmp/.
- Run cd /tmp/vmware-server-distrib;sudo ./vmware-install.pl. I used /home/vmware/bin for installation.
- When it asks where the directories for rc0.d thru rc6.d are, use /etc/rc.d/vmware.d.
- When it asks where the init directory is, use /etc/rc.d.
- *QUIT* when it asks you if you want to run VMware configuration for the first time.
- Extract VMware server any-to-any patch somewhere... i.e. /tmp/.
- Run cd /tmp/vmware-any-any-update*REV*;sudo ./runme.pl. This will patch VMware server modules to allow Linux kernel 2.6.20 compilation.
- For Linux 2.6.25 additionally to the previous patch115a or 116 you need to manually patch with 117_Alpha.
- For 2.6.25 extract 117 to the location tar xzf vmware-any-any-update-117-very-ALPHA.tgz -C /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/
- For 2.6.25 patch cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/ and run./vmware-2.6.25.sh and continue with next step.
- Run cd /home/vmware/bin;sudo ./vmware-config.pl to compile VMware modules.
[edit] Running
It's a possibility the first time you try to run Vmware server it'll throw an error stating something about "Unable to power virtual machine". Stop the VMware server and restart xinetd wtih /etc/rc.d/vmware stop;wait;/etc/rc.d/xinetd restart.
Rerun sudo /home/vmware/bin/vmware-config.pl again. If this still fails, restart your computer and do the above again. It should be fixed.
There is now a vmware init script in /etc/rc.d. You can add this to your daemons list if you want. I personally dont do this, but if you intend to use the vmware's network when not actually using vmware, then you will need to do this. You will need to start it before you can run vmware though.
There is a problem with vmware unable to run correctly after a reboot. To fix this edit /etc/rc.d/vmware, find the text below
case "$1" in start)
and put
rm /etc/vmware/not_configured
immediately after that line.
To start vmware, you just do vmware from a console window, or create a shortcut or menu item however you like.
Some notes:
Leave the /etc/rc.d/vmware.d directory there, because it is needed whenever you perform vmware-config.pl.
Remember, if the kernel is changed or updated, you will need to run vmware-config.pl again.
[edit] Kernel 2.6 and udev
Follow the steps above and then:
1. Modify udev config
Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/00-myrules.rules and add 2 lines:
# tty devices KERNEL="tty[[0-9]]*", NAME="vc/%n", SYMLINK="%k" # floppy devices KERNEL="fd[[0-9]]*", NAME="floppy/%n" , SYMLINK="fd%n"
2. Start/stop script
It takes care of devices and starts vmware, also stops vmware and removes dev entries. Call it, for example, mkvmdev, chmod it 755 and put in /etc/rc.d:
#!/bin/sh
. /etc/rc.conf
. /etc/rc.d/functions
case "$1" in
start)
stat_busy "Creating /dev entries and starting VMware"
for i in `seq 0 9`; do
mknod /dev/vmnet$i c 119 $i
chmod 0600 /dev/vmnet$i
done
for i in `seq 0 3`; do
mknod /dev/parport$i c 99 $i
chmod 0600 /dev/parport$i
done
mknod /dev/vmmon c 10 165
chmod 0660 /dev/vmmon
/etc/rc.d/vmware start
;;
stop)
stat_busy "Stopping VMware and removing /dev entries"
/etc/rc.d/vmware stop
rm /dev/vmmon
for i in `seq 0 3`; do
rm /dev/parport$i
done
for i in `seq 0 9`; do
rm /dev/vmnet$i
done
;;
restart)
$0 stop
$0 start
;;
*)
echo "usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
esac
exit 0
3. Modify /etc/rc.conf. (*Note - this step is optional! See also the notes under the "Running" section above)
Add mkvmdev to daemons in your rc.conf, and remember to remove vmware from rc.conf. Or if you prefer, you can delete the lines that launch vmware from mkvmdev and leave your original vmware in rc.conf - your choice.
Comments:
hi guys, a couple of quick questions:
- why is /dev/vmmon chmod 0660, as opposed to the rest (0600)?
- i suppose /dev/vmmon should be "rm"-ed as well in the "stop" section for the script above? (that line is missing) - FIXED
[edit] vmware and kernel 2.6.20 compile modules problem
Below is a solution for compiling the vmware modules on kernel 2.6.20.
cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/ sudo tar -xvf vmmon.tar cd vmmon-only sudo vi include/compat_kernel.h Find this: #define __NR_compat_exit __NR_exit static inline _syscall1(int, compat_exit, int, exit_code); and change the static inline ..... line to: int compat_exit(int exit_code); Then tar up the vmmon-only directory again. cd .. #go back to the source directory tar -cf vmmon.tar vmmon-only Finally, run vmware-config.pl
[edit] vmware and kernel 2.6.16 compile modules problem
PROBLEM: kernel 2.6.16-x - vmware or vmwareplayer complains that headers are incorect.
FIX: You need vmware-any-any-update patch mirror here or here.
Just untar the archive and run ./runme.pl as root - and you-re happy again!
[edit] vmware on kernel 2.6.22
May not work properly yet. Apply the patch from http://knihovny.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmware-any-any-update112.tar.gz , replace vmnet.tar with http://npw.net/~phbaer/vmnet.tar and reinstall. Note: this is an ugly hack, please dont put it into production systems. Some guest OS'es may have crashes and networking problems with this. Dont tell us that you havent been warned
[edit] vmware and kernel 2.6.24 compile modules problem
May not work properly yet. Apply the patch from http://bio.artcradle.com/temp/vault/vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz (untar, run runme.pl script) Note: this is an ugly hack, please don't put it into production systems. Some guest OS'es may have crashes and networking problems with this. Don't tell us that you haven't been warned
[edit] vmware and kernel 2.6.25 compile modules problem
There are extra steps required for Vmware WKS 6.0.3 build 80004, should be the same for VMware Server
- Install and patch as described (use vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz)
- Download the patch117vmware-any-any-update-117-very-ALPHA.tgz
- Extract the archive in /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
- Run vmware-2.6.25.sh and then vmware-config.pl
[edit] slow networking between host and guest
"Those oversized improperly checksummed packets are TCP Segmentation Offload packets. Use 'ethtool -k eth0 tso off' to disable TSO on eth0 (or any other interface which you want to get bridged). At this moment vmnet does not understand TSO, and in addition to that it is silly to use TSO together with bridged networking as vmnet will have to split such packet anyway to pass it to the guest, so splitting will be done anyway, and in addition to it kernel will have to prepare metadata about TCP stream for hardware, so you'll probably get worse performance with TSO enabled than with disabled when you'll have some guest running."
NOTE: ethtool is on extra packages
[edit] Samba issues
The guest os under vmware cannot see a samba share running on the linux host. To fix this problem, edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and make some changes under [global]. The following are suggested:
workgroup = YOUR_WORKGROUP
netbios name = YOUR_SERVER_NAME
encrypt passwords = yes
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
interfaces = eth0 vmnet1 vmnet8
sysv shm key=/dev/vmnet1
bind interfaces only = true
[edit] Connecting Remotely
If you setup a server that you would like to connect to remotely, please add the following to /etc/hosts.allow:
vmware-authd: ALL
This will enable xinetd to allow connections from a remote vmware client.
If this condition is not met, you may see in your /var/log/everything.log:
Feb 4 03:34:12 jeffc xinetd[7232]: libwrap refused connection to vmware-authd (libwrap=vmware-authd) from 192.168.1.1