Is VMware 8 compatible with Ubuntu 12.04?

Question

I am using VMware 8.0.4 and want to install Ubuntu 12.04, but I have not been able to do so successfully. Can you suggest compatible versions of VMware and Ubuntu? In particular, will Ubuntu 12.04 work with VMware 8?

Answer 1

VMware 8.0.4 is compatible with Ubuntu 12.04, you just need to apply a simple patch to allow the modules to build on the 3.2 kernel used by Ubuntu.

The patch is described and available on this page, but the version in there needs to be changed to 8.0.4 to apply successfully.

Here's how:

To download and apply the patch,

• Open a terminal and type:

  mkdir vmw_patch && cd vmw_patch
  wget -O- http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/vmware802fixlinux320.tar.gz | tar -xz
  sed -i -e 's/8.0.2/8.0.4/g' patch-modules_3.2.0.sh 
  ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh
  

• That should compile the modules without any errors.

Explanation: wget downloads the patch, and tar extracts it without actually saving the downloaded file. sed updates 8.0.2 to 8.0.4 in the patching script so that it will run.