BOLVERK – Tim's Lousy Blog

As it seems to be usual with Fedora, doing anything with vmware was not completely smooth. Here’s what I found needed to be done to my stock installation of Fedora Core 5. I’m assuming some Linux mojo as I’d think one would have to have some to have the aspiration to do this… Yell if I’m incorrect.

First, install gcc

yum install gcc

Install kernel header files

yum install kernel-devel

Check it matches the running kernel

uname -r; rpm -q kernel-devel

If the two do not match, upgrade and reboot

yum -y upgrade kernel kernel-devel

Locate the kernel headers

echo /usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)-$(uname -p)/include

Select ‘Install VMWare Tools’ from the console. Mount the virtual CDROM if it’s not automounted. Copy VMware Tools from the mount

cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-5.5.1-19175.tar.gz /tmp/

Unpack VMware Tools to a temporary directory

cd /tmp/

tar zxvf VMwareTools-5.5.1-19175.tar.gz

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/

./vmware-install.pl

When prompted with “Do you want to run vmware-config-tools.pl?”, answer no. Backup the original vmware-config-tools.pl

cp /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl.org

Get a patch for VMware Tools

cd /tmp/ wget http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmware-tools-any-update2.tar.gz

tar zxvf vmware-tools-any-update2.tar.gz

cd vmware-tools-any-update2/

./runme.pl

Again, when prompted “Do you want to run vmware-config-tools.pl?”, answer yes.

Create a symlink to the VMware mouse driver

ln -s /usr/lib/vmware-tools/configurator/XOrg/6.8.x/vmmouse_drv.o /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/

Change xorg mouse setting

vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Change “mouse” to “vmmouse” in Section “InputDevice” if necessary
Done, restart X