VMWare Workstation on Fedora 17...

Today, when I started VMWare Workstation, it notified me that there is a free security update. Since it is advisable to update whenever there are security issues, I approved it, but of course that after update I had a problem starting VMWare workstation. Since there are constantly problems with VMWare and Fedora I finally decided to track everything I had to do in this post. In other words, this post will be updated whenever I have to do something to VMWare Workstation to get it to work.

Ok, as I said, on a fully updated Fedora 17 (kernel-3.4.2-4.fc17.x86_64) when a new VMWare Workstation 8.0.4 is installed (or updated) it can not configure itself because of errors in kernel modules. As I wrote this I wasn't able to find a patch that fixes everything in one step, but I managed to combine two fixes that allowed VMWare to start. First, I had to apply patch for 8.0.3 that fixed vmnet.tar file. To do that I also had to modify a bit the script distributed with patch so that it accepts the fact that I'm using a newer version of VMWare (i.e. 8.0.4 instead of 8.0.3). Then, I had to apply a small fix for vmblock.tar that I wrote about in other post. Finally, I tried to start VMWare Workstation but it failed again?! After a bit poking, I realized  that there were dangling processes/modules so I had to kill all VMWare processes, remove modules, and that start succeeded. Of course that I could also restart the laptop, but because of the number of open windows I have, that wasn't an option. :)

When I did all that, then I found out that there is a patch that does all this, i.e. those two steps but combined, but it is for VMWare Workstation 8.0.2, which means you still have to poke a bit in script that applies a patch. And finally, this blog seems to be a good place to look when you have some problems with VMWare (and VirtualBox) and newer versions of kernel.