VMware Workstation 9 and Ubuntu 12.10

I have blogged about VMware and Linux in the past, most recently ( in 2010 !! ) here.

Well, things have moved on since then, and I'm now running the shiny new Ubuntu 12.10 ( aka Quantal Quetzel ) and the equally shiny new-ish VMware Workstation 9.0.

Having downloaded and installed the product, I was somewhat annoyed to find that, despite the passing of many years, it's still necessary to "hack" around in order to get the two products to play nicely.

The symptom was that, having installed Workstation, I saw: -

Unable to change virtual machine power state: Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to

when I attempted to start a VM.

As before, there's a patch required - this gets updated by various helpful members of the community each time the Linux kernel gets updated.

Thankfully, this blog post completely nailed it for me, in very short order: -

Kernel 3.5 and VMware

For the record, it's necessary to ensure that VMware is completely stopped before applying the patch. I achieved this by changing to runlevel 1: -

$ init 1

which means that Linux is running in Single-User mode.

Having applied the patch, I simply rebooted, and VMware Workstation now runs away merrily ....

For the record, I'm running this kernel: -

$ uname -a

Linux dmhw500 3.5.0-17-generic #28-Ubuntu SMP Tue Oct 9 19:32:08 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux

and this version of VMware: -

$ sudo vmware-installer -list

Product Name         Product Version     
==================== ====================
vmware-workstation   9.0.0.812388