Re: VMware installation problem

[Cameron Hutchison <camh+dl@xdna.net>]

Once upon a time Miroslav Maiksnar said...
> Hi,
> when installing vmware eval on my debian sarge I encounter problem compiling 
> modules. Install scripts refuses to compile modules because `uname -r` 
> ('2.6.3-alfons32-2') differs from UTS_RELEASE ('2.6.3'). Kernel is of course 
> compiled using `make-kpkg --append-to-version=...` and I need to run 
> different kernels with equal version, so leaving off --append-to-version is 
> not option for me.

I have also had problems building the vmware modules. What ended up
working for me is to run vmware-config.pl, let it fail. At this point
$KSRC/include/linux/version.h has been regenerated without the
--append-to-version string. So I manually edit this file to put back on
the --append-to-version string and then run vmware-config.pl again. This
time, the build seems to work.

I can't say why it works. However it looks like make-kpkg and
--append-to-version doesn't work so well with out of tree modules that
aren't built with make-kpkg. Even make-kpkg modules need a hack to get
--append-to-version to work (KPKG_EXTRAV_ARG), and at this point some
dont work yet (I've had to fix nvidia and ndiswrapper myself).