Install VMWare Player on Ubuntu 10.04

I need VMWare Player in my new installed Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit system. Unlike when I installed VMWare Player on Linux Mint 8, I faced problem with Ubuntu 10.04.

I downloaded VMWare Player 2.5 64-bit version installation file and ran it through terminal. The installation looks fine but when the installer were trying to do configuration, the installer stuck there and never finished. From a thread in ubuntuforums.org I found out that the cause was the setup unable to create vmnet virtual devices. So, I followed the suggestion in the website.

I open two terminals, in the first terminal I ran:

while true; do sudo killall -9 vmware-modconfig-console; sleep 1; done

The purpose of the above command is to kill “vmware-modconfig-console” from the memory. In the second terminal I ran the VMWare Player installation file. When the installation file was trying to configure, it ran “vmware-modconfig-console” which was the cause of the system hang, but the command in the first terminal kill the process immediately, so the installation process finished. The installation only installed the VMWare Player program, but it’s configuration, including “vmnet” is still unconfigured. In order to do that I needed to amend several files.

I exctracted vmnet.tar and vmci.tar from “/usr/lib/vmware/modules/source” folder into “/tmp” folder

tar xvf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar -C /tmp
tar xvf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmci.tar -C /tmp

I changed the working directory to “/tmp” folder

cd /tmp

I added #include “compat_sched.h” to “vmnet-only/vnetUserListener.c” and “vmci-only/include/pgtbl.h” files.

perl -pi -e ‘s,(“vnetInt.h”),\1\n#include “compat_sched.h”,’ vmnet-only/vnetUserListener.c
perl -pi -e ‘s,(“compat_page.h”),\1\n#include “compat_sched.h”,’ vmci-only/include/pgtbl.h

I archieved those folder again and put it in the original location

tar cvf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar vmnet-only
tar cvf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmci.tar vmci-only

I ran the command below to start configuration.

vmware-modconfig –console –install-all

I ran the VMWare Player, and everything looked fine. I ran the guest OS, a Windows XP, and I faced another problem. The mouse was not working properly, the VMWare Player status bar were flickering showed “To grab input, press Ctrl-G” and then “To release input, press Ctrl-Alt”, continuously. I found out a solution for this problem from this website. Inserted the line below into “/etc/vmware/bootstrap” file.

export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes

I tried again the VMWare Player, and it works fine… At last.