upgrade from ubuntu 13.04 to 13.10 causes vmware workstation 9 problems

Question

So, upgrading caused problem where running VMware Ws 9 needed patches to accommodate linux kernel 3.11. I applied the fixes I found that others reported, and now I can only run VMware Ws 9 from sudo. If i run it from standard user, it says it wants to recompile modules, which it does not do unless I open up a terminal and run sudo vmware.

That works, but would like it to work correctly -- i.e. have the modules that are recompiled stick. When running under sudo it does recompile with errors.. (vmware-unity-helper:13019): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "murrine",

But it starts up and works ok.

Any ideas?

Solution

So I found that by following these patches here

To apply:

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
tar -xf vmnet.tar
tar -xf vmblock.tar
cd vmnet-only
patch -p1 < ~/Downloads/procfs.patch
cd ../vmblock-only
patch -p1 < ~/Downloads/vmblock.3.10.patch
patch -p1 < ~/Downloads/vmblock.3.11.patch
cd ..
tar -cf vmblock.tar vmblock-only
tar -cf vmnet.tar vmnet-only
vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

You can download the patches here

I am able to start mine just fine as myself. I hope that this helps anyone else who is having VMWare Workstation 9 issues on Saucy.

Comments

[maco]

This worked perfectly.

[mirams]

I followed user2438233's instructions, the install got further but still failed. To fix it I also needed to apply the patch on communities.vmware.com/thread/432897 following the instructions there, then VMWare started OK. But it now says Unable to change virtual machine power state: Failed to power on '...Windows 7 x64.vmx'. Transport (VMDB) error -14: Pipe connection has been broken.