If you are a VMware user and an Ubuntu user you might have encountered an issue installing vmware’s kernel modules.  Basically as linux kernel development has accelerated over the last year or two, VMware did not keep up.

Skip to end of article for a script to run.

This is done on Ubuntu 13.04 running kernel 3.8.0-26-generic at the time of writing this article.

When you run VMware Workstation for the first time on a new machine after installation you will be presented with a dialogue asking you find the kernel headers.  The following command fixes this issue.  Either Ubuntu or VMware is not following the norm on where to store version.h:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) open-vm-dkms
sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/linux/version.h


The next command will install the modules.  You can just re-run VMware but doing this from the command line lets you examine any errors:

sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all


There is a good chance this will end with an error.  Previous versions of Vmware and the linux kernel this was about all you had to do.  A user on askubuntu posted a nice script that handles the patch required on vmci:

http://askubuntu.com/a/294691/167903

Simply run that script as root all should be well.  If you are nervous of running a random script give it a quick examine, it is pretty simple.

 

Halsafar