title: VMware Server on Ubuntu link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/vmware-server-on-ubuntu/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 418 created: 2008/12/14 23:05:30 created_gmt: 2008/12/14 23:05:30 comment_status: open post_name: vmware-server-on-ubuntu status: publish post_type: post

VMware Server on Ubuntu

This won’t be a long post. Yes, there’s a trick (or two) to getting VMware Server to work on Ubuntu. Fortunately, things have become much less complicated with the versions cited in the title. There are still a few dependencies that need to be there on the Ubuntu side, and one custom symlink, but otherwise things work pretty much as they should.

I first tried this out on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS with VMware Server 1.0.8, and later upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 for reasons I won’t mention here.

The best article I’ve seen on this is VMwareServer from the Ubuntu documentation project.

1. The dependencies. The following packages need to be installed on Ubuntu:

build-essential [should include latest linux-headers] ia32-libs xinetd libc6

2. Install VMware Server from the generic .tar.gz, not the rpm. Accept the defaults when running vmware-install.pl. Go right ahead and let it also run vmware-config.pl, accept the defaults — except maybe for the location for your virtual machines, I usually designate a nonstandard partition like /export.

3. Be sure to force create the following symlink:

`

sudo ln -sf /lib/libgcc_s.so.1
/usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1

`

4. Reboot the system. When it comes back up everything should work.

Update: For Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), there’s an extra step in the middle. Because of it uses a newer kernel, VMware 1.0.7 and forward need a patch. Fortunately for everyone, this guy named Kang has posted the fix on his blog.

Also on 8.10 I noticed that a Cntl-Alt-Del when the mouse focus was in the VM console window was not longer being detected. In fact, as it turned out, none of the following keys were functional inside the VM: Delete, Up/Down/Left/Right arrows, Insert, Home, End. Basically everything in that upper right quadrant of the Thinkpad keyboard. Fixing that required setting my gnome Keyboard preference to explicitly use the Thinkpad T61 Layout, and adding the following line to /etc/vmware/config:

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = "true"

Both VMware and X got a restart for good measure (restart X with the traditional Cntl-Alt-Bksp).

Note: Any change to /etc/vmware/config will get overwritten the next time vmware-config.pl is run (e.g. when reconfiguring after a kernel update), so be sure to restore this setting in that event.

This last tip came from here. Another, more extended discussion with comments, can be found here.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo