Install VMware Workstation 8 in Fedora 17

When I was attempting to install VMware Workstation 8 on my Fedora 17 64 bit OS. I had a few problems when it tried to compile the virtual network adapters.  After a little bit of trouble shooting and searching I realized there was a patch that I needed to apply in order to get the two working together. 

As noted below from a commenter named Adam, this method also works with VMWare workstation 8.0.4.  Thanks Adam!

Heres the steps:

First, we need to make sure we have all the dependancies installed before proceeding, so run the following command:

yum install gcc kernel-devel kernel-headers

Then, download VMware Workstation from http://www.vmware.com Once you have it downloaded, run the installer script that you downloaded.  This will build Workstation in your OS.  It will also inject a fwe more menu items.  This is where I had my problems.  When I tried to launch Workstsation, it would complain about not being able to compile a few of the modules it needed for the current kernel.  To solve this problem, you will need to patch a few files.  Diasnet from FedoraForums.org has built a very handy patch for us!  

Download the patch here:  patch-vmware803.tar

Once you have the tar downloaded, extract it to any directory ( /tmp is fine) and run the patch using this command:

./patch-modules_3.4.0.sh

After the patch has finished running, you should be able to launch VMware Workstation from your menu, and begin using it.

If you would like to read up more on the post over at FedoraForum.org, follow this link: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1581288

12 Comments

  • Adam says:

    FYI, you can add 8.0.4 to the version list. It works just fine.

  • Anumod says:

    I first installed the vmware 8.0.4..
    ran in to problems and found ur page
    after which i did the yum install gcc kernel-dlevel ---
    i didnt uninstall the vmware
    and did the ./patch_module command
    but it gave me a message saying this is for vmware version 8.0.3 and exited is there any other way you can suggest me to run vmware 8.0.4 in fedora 17..
    regards

    • CubedRoot says:

      Anumod,
      You can try this:
      Open the patch-modules_3.4.0.sh in a text editor
      Look for the line that has vmreqver=8.0.3
      Change that line to this: vmreqver=8.0.4

      Then try re-running the patch. If that works, let me know and I will rebuild the patch and put it on the site for others to download.
      Thanks!

      • Mike says:

        I can confirm that editing the file and changing the version number did indeed work. Thanks so much for the help!

  • Venkat says:

    Thanks Buddy!

    This patch solved my problem

    Cheers [_]}

  • Geoff says:

    Thanks a lot for posting this it helped me a lot.
    I also ran into the step required to manually edit the patch for 8.0.4.

  • Thomas Wan says:

    I was able to install VMWare Workstation on Fedora above post. It worked very well and really help me a lot. Later on my Fedora kernel has been upgraded and VMWare Workstation no longer work any more. Although I try to run vmware-modconfig --console --install-all, it keeps say I need to install gcc and kernel-headers even I have already done again. If come up any solution, please kindly share. Thanks.

  • Yousef says:

    Hi,
    It's work for me too.
    I use VMware-Workstation-Full-8.0.2-591240
    thanks for your solution 😉

  • Jake says:

    Just wanted to let you know that I was unable to get this to work with 8.0.6

    if I change the Variable vmreqver=8.0.3 to 8.0.6

    the script fails with 'vmware3.4.0.patch' not found. Please, copy it to the current '/tmp' directory. Exiting

    Might work with more tweaking, but the patch does not work with a simple version switch now as of 8.0.6

    Just a heads up.

  • Rodney says:

    Hi,
    I've download the files as noted above. My problem is that both before and after I installed them I still get a complaint about the magic number not being correct. I'm using Fedora 17 at the moment. Any suggestions?

    Thanks,
    Rod

Leave a Reply to Thomas Wan

XHTML: You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

%d bloggers like this: