Hi,

I've just installed SuSE 9.0 Professional.
Now I want to tryout VMWare 4.0 (latest build). Which one to use: .tgz or .rpm edition?

If anyone have succeeded installing it on SuSE 9, please tell me, maybe what issues I can run into etc.

Cheers
rjpa

I haven't used SuSE, but I would suggest the choice you prefer.
The RPM has a chance of going bad (which first got me turned off at them). It's also simple to install, and doesn't need any compilation (except for the VMWare kernel modules, but I don't quite remember if it compiles those or if they are binary only)
The tar.gz is less likely to mess up like RPM. Installing it is preety much just as easy, just you need to make sure you have the development packages so it can compile everything.

The installation package format usually has no influence to the function of the packages content. Exceptions:
- broken packages
- rpms or tgz packed without quality in mind and not thoroughly tested
- a broken local rpm database
(Killing rpm commands during installation leads to this)

If you install VmWare (Workstation 4) an a suse (9) distribution that is powered by an ATHLON cpu, be careful during execution of "vmware-config.pl".

The script will offer You to build the "vmware kernel modules" and overwrite the vmware modules shipped with the kernel customized for ATHLON.

See http://portal.suse.de/sdb/en/2003/10..._probleme.html
for further details.

VMware 4 does not officially support SuSE Linux 9.0. It also conflicts with vmware modules that are coming with SuSE Linux. So you cannot use default configuration on SuSE 9.0

There is a brief explanation of that issue at http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-l...-Oct/3516.html

I did a little bit differently as I already had VMware installed and configured.

1. Stop vmware services (/etc/init.d/vmware stop I had to reboot before that because vmware thought there were open virtual machines. There were crached VM-s and I didn't bother to figure out how to shut them down)
2. Install or update ks_vmware sources package coming with SuSE 9.0 (with yast2)
3. cd /usr/src
4. ln -s linux-2.4.21-99 linux (you can skip this step linux already points in right direction)
5. cd linux
6. make cloneconfig
7. make dep && make clean
8. cd /usr/src/kernel-modules/vmware
9. make -f Makefile.module
10. make -f Makefile.module install
11. /etc/init.d/vmware start

VMware does work now. Not as smoothly as on SuSE 8.2 though :|

It seems like Vmware works fine on latest SuSE kernel patch ... kernel 2.4.21-192.