How do I get VMware Workstation 8.0.4 working on Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit?

Question

I've bought VMware Workstation 8 just today. After the installation I launched it and the application noticed me that "several modules must be compiled and loaded into the running kernel".

During the process, VMware noticed me that was impossible to configure Virtual Network Devices and at the end, was impossible to start the services.

The last message said that further information could be found at this address: /tmp/vmware-root-975001794/modconfig-22789.log

So, I've pasted the content of the log message here.

Can you help me or, rather, you suggest to wait for future updates of Ubuntu? My desktop environment is Unity.

Solution

A simple patch needs to be applied to the module sources

The patch is described and available on this page, but the version in there needs to be changed to 8.0.4 to apply successfully.

Here's how:

To download and apply the patch,

• Open a terminal and type:

  mkdir vmw_patch && cd vmw_patch
  wget -O- http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/vmware802fixlinux320.tar.gz | tar -xz
  sed -i -e 's/8.0.2/8.0.4/g' patch-modules_3.2.0.sh 
  ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh
  

• That should compile the modules without any errors.

Explanation: wget downloads the patch, and tar extracts it without actually saving the downloaded file. sed updates 8.0.2 to 8.0.4 in the patching script so that it will run.

Comments

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