OpenSuse 11.1 on VMware Workstation – vmware-modconfig

It’s not often you’re likely to see a VMware Workstation post here. Why? Because for my limited use case, it “Just Works”. Really, it just does. This weekend however, I had some minor issues, why? Well, at some time on Friday (Saturday?) my Ubuntu 8.04 host install gave up the ghost. Some update or another caused wireless to quit working. Rather than deal with troubleshooting it, I figured on a reinstall. As part of that, I decided to get OpenSuse a shot, and that, right there, is where I ran into problems.

The Problem

After pulling down the VMware-Workstation.*.rpm I figured I was in good shape, just a standard rpm –i and I was off. Or so I thought, here is what I was greeted with after running ‘vmware’ post install:

$ vmware
Logging to /tmp/setup-13590.log
modinfo: could not find module vmmon
…
modinfo: could not find module vmci
modinfo: could not find module vsock
modinfo: could not find module vmmon

You get the point, it was unhappy. So, just install the kernel sources, and rebuild the modules, right?

The Solution

The solution turned out to be four fold:

  1. Ensure haldaemon is running
  2. Install kernel-default & kernel-source
  3. "mv /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary.old"
  4. "vmware-modconfig –console –install-all"

Actually looking at it now, it doesn’t look like it should have taken me all the time it did, but being new to Suse, it was a bit ‘interesting’. Further, I didn’t find out about ‘vmware-modconfig’ until finding this communities post.

Everything is now nice and happy again in the land of desktop virtualization.