VMware Server Beta on Ubuntu 7

Posted by James Wilford Sat, 01 Apr 2006 15:25:00 GMT

Anyone wanting to run virtual machines on Ubuntu will be interested to hear that VMware currently have a beta version of VMware server available for free download. However, installation has a few pitfalls, so here is how to do it.

Dapper Update

I'm still amazed by the popularity of this article. For anyone still struggling with the installation of VMWare Server (now out of beta but still a free download) - you'll be pleased to know that its easier on Dapper as you don't need to worry about the gcc version. As described in the comment from mips below (many thanks mips), you just need to do this:


$ sudo apt-get install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-`uname -r`
$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Prepare your host

To run any VMware products on Ubuntu, there are a couple of prerequisites. The installation involves compilation of a kernel module, so you first need to install the kernel headers for your kernel version, for example:


root@ubuntu:~ # uname -a
Linux ubuntu 2.6.12-10-k7 ...

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.12-10-k7

You will also need gcc-3.4 (edit: only necessary on Ubuntu Breezy):


sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4

Get VMware Server

Next head over to www.vmware.com/products/server/ and download the free VMware Server beta. You will need to register and then you will get a license key by email.

Download the tar.gz version, extract it, and cd to the installation directory:


tar -xzvf VMware-server-e.x.p-22874.tar.gz
cd vmware-server-distrib

Run the installer, making sure you will be using gcc-3.4 (Breezy only):


export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4
./vmware-install.pl

Accept all the defaults, with the possible exception of the directory to store your virtual machines - I chose to put them in a subdirectory of my home directory, as space is limited in my root partition. Note you'll be prompted for your license key during installation - this will be in your email.

Try out the Browser Appliance

To test out your shiny new VMware installation, download the Browser Appliance pre-built virtual machine from the VMware site. You'll be pleased to discover that its actually a pretty standard installation of Ubuntu 5.10!

To run it, fire up VMware Server from your Gnome (or KDE) menu, and choose to open an existing VM. If your host machine is in a NAT network behind a router that gives out addresses with DHCP, then change the eth0 networking type to "bridged". Networking should then work straight away - your guest machine will pick up an IP from your router.

And that's all folks - comments welcome as always!

Comments

Leave a comment

  1. Steven Maglio 28 days later:

    okay, that post looks pretty bad. Here's a second attempt (sorry):

    Thanks for the How To!! I have been struggling with the installation for a while. I used your guide to install vmware server on the Dapper Drake Beta. And a few more steps were needed.

    1. the kernel is different, so I needed to use gcc-4.0.
      export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.0
    2. my machine didn't have "make" installed on it yet.
      sudo apt-get install make
    3. the vmware compiler wanted to use "gcc" as the compiler program. This required the addition of a symbolic link to the gcc-4.0 executable.
      ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.0 /usr/bin/gcc

    Other than that, the How To worked perfectly for me. And the problems that did occur, happened because the system had a fresh install of the operating system.

    Thanks again for the How To.

  2. James Wilford about 1 month later:

    Thanks for your comment and the Dapper update, much appreciated.
    BTW I deleted your first comment with the messed up formatting. Looks like I might need to adjust my blog settings so you don't have to type raw html!

  3. mips about 1 month later:

    For Dapper I just did:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-uname -r

    sudo ./vmware-install.pl

    Answered "yes" to all the prompts and it was installed.

  4. mark about 1 month later:

    Thanks for the great instructions - the one app on Windows I can't (unfortunately) live without is MS Money 2006. I've tried all the Mac OS X and Linux alternatives and just couldn't find one that worked well for me. Now, with Vmware server and Ubuntu (just switched from Suse 10.1, which was giving me some fits) I'm able to run MS Money without having to reboot! Awesome.

    One thing though: I did have one issue with the vmware server installer not being able to find the linux-header files. The default directory was not working because it kept insisting that 'linux' was in the directory path. Turned out all I needed to do was logout and re-login to ubuntu and restart the installer (after installing the header files). I guess there is a conf file that was edited during that reboot because the next time I tried running the vmware installer it had the correct default path for the header files, so I only needed to hit enter. Works like a charm now!

  5. Jay Hopping 2 months later:

    ubuntu-server 6.06 fresh install: I had to install X because of some library dependency. I wimped out and installed the whole desktop:

    sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

    Also, to install the VMWare Management Interface you will need to

    sudo apt-get install libdb2

  6. J.Beach 2 months later:

    Here is what I did to get vmware working on a fresh install of Ubuntu6.06 server.

    sudo apt-get install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-uname -r sudo apt-get install libxtst6 libx11-6 libXrender1 libXt6 libdb3

    I received the following error: "VMware Server must be installed on this machine for the VMware Management Interface to work

    Execution aborted."

    Type this "vmware -v" to see what lib is missing. The following solved that problem: sudo apt-get install libXi6

    Then I had problems installing vmware-mui. It would not recognise the libdb.so.3. The following solved that: "sudo apt-get install libdb2" "sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libdb-4.3.so /usr/lib/libdb.so.3"

    Hope that saves someone some time. Cheers.

  7. chris 2 months later:

    Thank you J.Beach, it saved me a ton of time. But my results were slightly different. After a fresh ubuntu 6.06 server install, I had to install the following libraries:

    sudo apt-get install libx11-6 libxtst6 libXt6 libXrender1 libXi6 libstdc++5 libssl0.9.7 libcrypto++5.2c2a

    So I basically ran ldd on every bin starting with vm. :)