How do I install VMWare Tools on Fedora 9?

[markw10]

I have VMWare Fusion on my Mac and just downloaded Fedora 9 and installed it with the Gnome interface. In the past I've installed OpenSUSE w/ KDE, Ubuntu w/Gnome, and Mandriva w/KDE and rarely have a problem but can't get it to work this time. Is there any special procedure to install VMWare Tools on Fedora 9?

[CraigWatson]

I had massive trouble getting VMWare Tools installed on my Fedora 8 VM (running as a guest with Windows XP as host) - I managed to find a pre-built RPM for Open VM Tools but I can't find the link again.

I think the best thing is to try building Open VM Tools from source: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204462 - you may need the kernel headers for whatever kernel you have.

[ytsamy]

I've downloaded VMware-player-2.0.3-80004.x86_64.tar.gz from vmware.com and installed it. The install script complained about missing libraries:
The following libraries could not be found on your system:
libX11.so.6
libXtst.so.6
libXext.so.6
libXrender.so.1
libz.so.1

You will need to install these manually before you can run VMware Player.
although it allowed me to continue.
It failed later, when compiling the kernel modules and I had to download vmware-any-any-update117 to get them to compile.
But when i try to run vmplayer from a console, it issues an error:
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx: error while loading shared libraries: libX11.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
while the GUI shows a dialog box:
Error while powering on: failed to connect to peer process
I've checked that the libraries are indeed installed, tried to set LD_PRELOAD or LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but with no result.
Does anyone have any idea where the problem lies?

[waltc]

I, too, using the anyany117 tar fole successfully built the Workstation product on Fedora 9 (64) and when trying to start a vm received the "Unable to change virtual machine power state: Failed to connect to peer process." message. When trying to start a vm through the command line there were no errors but nothing happened. I wish VMWare would resolve this once and for all. In the absence of that I want my money back. Does anyone have a solution to this and the previous issue?

[johannlo]

Don't bother with Fedora 9 on vmware as a guest. Its a dog.

vmware tools won't build properly.

smb and nfs services FREEZE ON BOOT. Definitely no go. However if you skip them and start them manually in command line they work?!?!?!.

eth0 won't start even with proper scripts in ifcfg-eth0 and yes networkmanager disabled. I haven't tried putting ifup into rc.local, that is pretty lame for core functionality.

gnome freezes on boot (fixed this by turning updates off, it was hanging because there was no network. Really that is pathetic.)

Fedora 8 host + vmware workstation 6.0.2 + any-any patch = brilliant
Fedora 9 as vmware guest = an absolute dog.

Sorry If I sound angry but I am, I have wasted half a day on this trying to build an 'appliance' for my team to use in the lab and it feels like my linux newbie days all over again. Really, really disappointed. Now I know its bleeding edge blah blah and vmware not officially supported blah blah but really. When 90% of other distros or windoze + squillions of production servers works without a hitch.

- Loyal Fedora user on F8 - Pissed at F9 -

[Seve]

Hello:
Strangely enough I have had no problem with F9 as a host and as a Guest ?

This is with VMware-Server 1.0.5 build-80187, using the 117 any-any patch and with vmware-tools installed.

I certainly can't say that I have tried every option available, however, so far it has worked fine.

Seve

[johannlo]

hmmm I guess (after the red mist goes away) it could possibly be a host OS / vmware workstation application issue. Too many variables....

anyhow it just reinforces the old lesson to stay one version behind the release ;)

[waltc]

No No.. I am trying to yse Fedora 9 as a host. I had been running Ubuntu 8.04 as the host for Workstation. I thought running XP guests underneath it was slow. The guests actually run much faster, so it seems, running under pure KVM under F9. However I could not get sound to work (important with the lack of plugins for FireFox 3) and I can not get the guests to see the Windows mounts on other machines. It's always something eh? I rather liked Ubuntu 8.04 but unlike the rest of the Linux distros U8.04 would not honor my firmware RAID nor my LVM volume set comprised of two physical drives. Fedora has always had no problem with LVM so I, reluctantly, moved to F9 once it went GA.

So Ubuntu can run VMWare Workstation and guests can access local Window machines but U8 doesn't do LVM.
Fedora 9 does LVM and multiple physical drives just fine, but can't install VMWare workstation, also seems to do a better job with KVM than U8.

I couldn't get VMWare Server to build at all under F9. That's why I shelled out the $190 to purchase Workstation. There are too many things I want to accomplish and futzing with a VMWare install mix and match is not one of them.

[johannlo]

waltc if you are paying and this is a work thing, I would go with a supported OS as a host.

F9 is not supported but Red Hat is, go with that. I bet that it would work fine with RHEL5 as both guest and host, unlike F9 vmware has actually tested with that distro. Ditto with any of the 'corporate' distros like SLES

[waltc]

Well, that's the thing. RHEL5 is supported and has the same kernel as F9 and U8.04. So where it works, and is supported, on RHEL5 and works but is not 'supported' on U8.04, there should be no reason why it doesn't work on F9. If VMWare comes back to me and says it is not supported, have a nice day. My reply would be where is my money back then. Unfortumately it is not a work thing, per se. It is what I refer to as a cost of doing business. The for free part of my job is to stay current, and relevant in software. It seems to me the two most popular Linux distros are Fedora and Ubuntu. I am not sure how different RedHat 5 is from Fedora 9, given they both have the 2.6.25 kernel. I suppose they could have two different packaging and distribution structures but why support the two different structures. I see it more of that Redhat supports RHEL and doesn't 'support' Fedora. Isn't Fedora really the incubator for RH?

All that said. I understand VMware Workstation 6.5 beta works just fine out of the box on F9. I did open an incident with VMWare on this as one get 30 days of free support with the purchase.

Ironically, this is why I went to Ubuntu in the first place, F5 or 6 (Jan/Feb of 2007) that Fedora was just too much of a labor of love to keep working. Ubuntu seemed to 'just work'. I bought this new machine Dell XPS 720 and I couldn't get Ubuntu to even boot on it. Hello Fedora8 and it supported the firmware RAID and two drive LVM! Yeehaw!. U8.04 did everything I wanted, even support the NVidia geforce 8800 but crashed and burned on the firmware RAID and 2 drive LVM. I got the two drives under a single volume set but df never saw it. Hello F9! Also F9 allowed me to define and install a KVM vm from dvd, something U8 didn't seem to be able to accomplish. If I could get sound and local Windows mounts to work under KVM I'd bag VMWare but....Hello VMWare.

I hope they don't take the 'not supported' path. If they do, they can refund my money and I'll call it even.

I would like to see them (VMWare) resolve this one. I mean, c'mon...

[johannlo]

You're right in principle but the issue may not be with the kernel itself. There is a lot of F9 components that are different in RHEL. Not having done proper debugging / testing, I can only speculate.

Personally, Workstation 6 works great on F8 host to run XP and muck around with other stuff (even Cisco CallManager 4.1). Fortunately I do not have a business requirement and as a network engineer this is all 'side' knowledge. I was hoping to build a F9 virtual machine to use as a lab test host (corporate environment locked down to the nth degree, so having our own web/snmp/mysql/you-name-it/sniffer/port scanning appliance of network doom would be very handy for testing).

Good luck with your issue.

[waltc]

Johannlo, you mentioned corpporate distros. Yes, RH is but Ubuntu 6.x and I thought 7.x is on the list as well as Mandrake and lessor known distros. I think Fedora is simply conspicuously absent. Of course they could say, not supported as it technically is not on the list. That would be piss poor tech support though. I bet someone there (VMWare tech support) is running Fedora. Isn't F9 supposed to be the new Ubuntu?

[johannlo]

I understand your sentiments, but seeing as F9 is not even a month old I don't think its unreasonable for vmware to take a stand on it, seeing as its not on their list.

Remember they have to support five-nines uptimes with all their bling tools (v-motion, transparent app migration between virtual servers, transparent load balancing between physical hosts etc.), I would be taking the same position myself if I was vmware.

[waltc]

I did hear back from VMWare support. Unfortunately I am at work so I can not try the first, "try this", but the suggestion is copy libXrender.so.1 to collocate with the other vmware shared objects. He mentioned where that was but I don't recall at present, /usr/lib/vmware? I mention that before being tried so as to provide others in this same predicament an opportunity to try that before I can and respond back. I believe a lot of folks want to use VMWare and the more successful they are the more successful vmware will become. Or so the logic goes.

[johannlo]

Thats funny because right now I am trying to compile open vmware tools, as vmware tools fails to install most modules (cut and paste + mouse works thou).

It fails due to a dependency on that exact package, except I have expressly installed that package via yum and checked with rpm -qa.

Interesting.... will try it tommorrow! thanks

[waltc]

I misspoke. The shared object is in /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libXrender.so.1 directory. The instructions were to move it to the /usr/lib. I wonder if all the libraries in the message several back from here must be installed in their 32bit versions. This is the question I posed to VMWare. Unlike the message several back I never received a message saying they were missing and the product could not be run until they were installed. I also can't find the log of the install now either to see if it flew by. The above mentioned post said the vmware-config.pl finished with no errors so I suppose it's possible I missed the messages. Its the ypsami post from 5/21. It sounds like you are way more linux fluent than I am but isn't that part of the rpm package, dependencies???? Could this be partially a flaw with rpm vs. apt-get or whatever the packaging system is for Ubuntu????

[peikai]

I love FC9 !!!
My problem was: "Unable to change virtual machine power state: Failed to connect to peer process"
Actually its easy to fix this issue: (I am using FC9 x86-64bit)
yum provides libXtst
yum install libXtst.i386
Thats' in!

Cheers,
Kai

[johannlo]

quick question peikai: is yum provides?

waltc; sounds like you are making progress. it didn't work for me but I am building vmware tools in a F8 guest, you are trying to build workstation itself on F9 host.

Not sure what you are referring to re: packaging error, but if you mean that vmware expects XYZ to be somewhere different to where Fedora actually puts it, then yes, that could be the issue. Don't think its actually rpm/yum/apt issue as these locations would be defined by the package itself not the packaging manager.

[waltc]

No, it did not work for me either. I'll try the peikai solution, install libXtst.i386.

[waltc]

This is exactly what I did not want to have happen. F9 or perhaps VMWare Workstation rpm is so incredibly broken.

I followed what peikai said and that didn't work but I did get a message when trying to rerun vmware-conf.pl that a series of packages were missing. I loaded the 32 bit equivalence of them as the 64 bits were already there. I again tried to start workstation and a vm under it, no luck then either so I tried again to run vmware-config.pl. It showed only libz.so.1 was missing. I tried to load it and although it said it was loaded I couldn't find it other than in the 64 bit library. So no I had more information to google on and found this on the f9 and vmware board :

" Peter Teoh
View profile
More options May 18, 5:14 am
From: "Peter Teoh" <htmldevelo...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 18 May 2008 17:14:18 +0800
Local: Sun, May 18 2008 5:14 am
Subject: F9 and Vmware : a working solution (kernel-2.6.25.3-18.fc9
Reply | Reply to author | Forward | Print | Individual message | Show original | Report this message | Find messages by this author
Just saw this email:

From: Remi Collet <Fed...@famillecollet.com>
Date: Sun, May 18, 2008 at 3:43 PM
Subject: Re: F9 and Vmware : a working solution (kernel-2.6.25.3-18.fc9
To: For users of Fedora <fedora-l...@redhat.com>

Sieranski, Greg a écrit :

> I am running Fedora 9 x86_64 on a thinpad t60p. I am trying to install

From : http://communities.vmware.com/thread/144231
First you must the patch version 117 :

http://download.rsbac.org/tmp/vmware-any-any-update117.tar.gz

And for x86_64, you must install a lot of 32 bits packages :

yum install "/lib/ld-linux.so.2" libX11.so.6 libXtst.so.6 libXext.so.6 \
libXt.so.6 libICE.so.6 libSM.so.6 libXrender.so.1 libz.so.1 \
libXi.so.6 libXft.so.2 libfreetype.so.6 libfontconfig.so.1 \
libpangoxft-1.0.so.0 libpangox-1.0.so.0 libpango-1.0.so.0 \
libgobject-2.0.so.0 libgmodule-2.0.so.0 libatk-1.0.so.0 \
libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 xinetd

Hops that help.

--
Regards,
Peter Teoh
"

I tried that and it tried to load 39 packages...this can't be right. But I tried it anyway and it trucked along only to get an indeterminate amount of errors such as :

file /usr/lib/gconv/libKSC.so from install of glibc-2.8-3.i686 conflicts with file from package glibc-2.8-3.i386
file /usr/libexec/getconf/POSIX_V6_ILP32_OFF32 from install of glibc-2.8-3.i686 conflicts with file from package glibc-2.8-3.i386
file /usr/libexec/getconf/POSIX_V6_ILP32_OFFBIG from install of glibc-2.8-3.i686 conflicts with file from package glibc-2.8-3.i386

Error Summary
-------------

and it STILL can't resolve libz.so.1

So my question is, is my system all fracked now? Again, the rpm should list all dependent packages, right? If those packages have dependencies they should get resolved by yum, right? Oh, speaking of this, perhaps it is package kit but through the gui if I want to install the 32 version of a package where I already have the 64 bit package it lets me select install but then says I already have it, when I don't and it shows I don't.

This is too bizzare...I need a drink.

So after I finished typing the above I tried the runme.pl and it said it didn't need to run and went into the config for workstation. I got the message about zlib and thought, what the frack, I'll try it again and it, again, appeared to load. I tried to start the vm again and got the following:

"You are running VMware Workstation with the DEBUG option. Please be advised that the additional logging and error checking enabled by this option result in substantially slower execution.
This option cannot be disabled on this build of VMware Workstation."

I do not want to debug option Any thoughts on this?

[rweed]

Hello:
Strangely enough I have had no problem with F9 as a host and as a Guest ?

This is with VMware-Server 1.0.5 build-80187, using the 117 any-any patch and with vmware-tools installed.

I certainly can't say that I have tried every option available, however, so far it has worked fine.

Seve
You don't have any issues with the mouse pointer and mouse clicks not being in the same spot?

[waltc]

That certainly is most annoying yes, but if you define a tablet the mouse pointer and tracker / hotspot will converge. I suspect Seve was using the tablet definition and therefore didn't see the mouse error. My experience currently is although I can start the vm I can not keep it running. At least on F9 VMware is very fragile.

[rweed]

That certainly is most annoying yes, but if you define a tablet the mouse pointer and tracker / hotspot will converge. I suspect Seve was using the tablet definition and therefore didn't see the mouse error. My experience currently is although I can start the vm I can not keep it running. At least on F9 VMware is very fragile.
Walt...how you define a tablet?
thx, Rick

[Seve]

You don't have any issues with the mouse pointer and mouse clicks not being in the same spot?
Hello:
No I don't at this point.
NVIDIA Driver Version: 173.14.05

The biggest issue has been playing with the resolution size other than that things have worked fine. [keep in mind my demands may be different than others]
The resolution / screen size in both i686 and x86_64 have been a pain to get the way I want them to be.

Seve

[ytsamy]

I too had to install the i386 versions of the missing libraries, along with the already installed x86_64. I don't understand why the downloaded x86_64 version of vmware-workstation/vmware-player comes with i386 shared files, and therefore, requests i386 versions of the system libraries.
When I finally installed all of them and their dependencies, the install scripts issued no warning about missing libraries. I could launch vmplayer, but when i tried to run a vm, my whole system systematically hanged.
Looking inside /usr/lib/vmware/lib/, I found a mix of 32 bits and 64 bits libraries, and even 2 symlinks to my system libraries in /usr/lib64 (in particular, there was a directory named "libX11.so.6" which contained a symlink to my 64-bits version of the library) . Is it possible to link against 32bits and 64 bits libraries at the same time?
I still have no idea of what to do. Maybe I'll have more luck with F8. I'll try to install it these days

[waltc]

That's the same thing with me except I didn't track down any cross linked libraries. I think if I found that I'd reinstal something, maybe Ubuntu 8.04. As I've mentioned elsewhere, if not here, I had no trouble running the trail version of Workstation 6.03 under Ubuntu. As the trial ran out about the time F9 went GA I didn't have the opportunity to see just what a complete cluster f getting VMWare Workstation would be under F9. Right now I am not sure what the state of my libraries are.

One thing to make sure you do when trying to run Workstation, and perhaps Player, is to, if you installed KVM be sure to modprobe -r kvm-intel or kvm-amd (you know...depending on processor) as that does cause a VM start to cause a kernel lockup.

[ytsamy]

You got it! KVM had been installed by default. I removed the kvm module and I VM just ran.
Thanx a lot.

[johannlo]

still no luck here (with building vmware-tools properly on F9 guest in Vista host) despite several blind alleys :)

Oh well stuff it, I'll just blame vista (work laptop)

[rweed]

still no luck here (with building vmware-tools properly on F9 guest in Vista host) despite several blind alleys :)

Oh well stuff it, I'll just blame vista (work laptop)
Do you have the latest VMware server (1.0.6)? That fixed some build issues. If not, get it and be sure to update VMware Tools in your guest once you install it. Post the compile output here if you still have issues and I'll just send you my tar files.

[mathan]

me to the GUI
Error while powering on: failed to connect to peer process

and install update patch but no use
please help me i install 6.9xxx x86_64 version