Re: VMware on Debian

["Jeremy Brooks" <jeremyb@whirljack.net>]

> Is VMware able to handle kernels that have version names like 2.6.10-v1 ?
> It
> appears as though it can only handle names like 2.6.10.
>
> Every time I reboot, I need to reconfigure vmware, has anyone else had
> this
> problem in Debian?  I would ask VMware support about this, but Debian is
> not
> a supported distribution for VMware.
>
> thanks


I run vmware on my Debian machine, with a kernel name of 2.6.10.20050126n,
seems to work just fine.
 IIRC, you have to reconfigure it every time you reboot because the vmware
devices are not recreated by udev.

I use two scripts to handle this for me.  One actually creates the device
nodes (has to be run as root, I use sudo), the other is a wrapper to
launch vmware and call the fix script if needed.

Here they are, hope this helps:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash

# fix vmware devices that udev does not know about

rm -f /etc/vmware/not_configured

for a in `seq 0 9`; do
mknod /dev/vmnet$a c 119 $a > /dev/null 2>&1
done
mknod /dev/vmmon c 10 165 > /dev/null 2>&1

/etc/init.d/vmware restart
------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash

# script to launch vmware
#
# handles the case where device nodes have
# not been created because udev doesn't know
# about them.
#
# requires fix_vmware script to be run as root
# via sudo.
# requires zentiy for eye candy.

FIX_VMWARE=/home/jeremyb/bin/fix_vmware
VMWARE=/usr/local/bin/vmware

# do the device nodes exist?
if [ ! -d /dev/vmnet0 ]; then
  zenity --question --text="Device nodes do not exist.  Attempt to create
them?"
  response=$?
  if [ "$response" = "0" ] ; then
    sudo $FIX_VMWARE | zenity --progress --text="Creating device nodes and
starting vmware..." --auto-close --pulsate
  else
    echo "exiting"
    exit 1
  fi
fi

# launch
$VMWARE &

exit 0
------------------------------------------------------------------------