Installing vmware on Redhat 9

frater · 03-24-2009, 04:22 AM

At work we have an old Compaq ML-330 G3
It has 750 MB RAM, A Xeon-processor and an IDE-RAID with 4 400 GB harddisks.

I tried to install Fedora and Ubuntu, but during the install they accessed the harddisks directly. After the install the system booted and it refused to continue after grub.
I then decided to attach an 160 GB harddisk on the normal PATA-interface, but then found out the system refused to boot from that device (the darn thing only boots from the IDE-RAID).

The LSI Megaraid controller has a driver for RH9 and I finally succeeded to install Redhat 9 using the onboard RAID-controller.
I used all 3 CD's making sure that the C development kit was there....
I now have a running system.

During the install of vmware 1.08 the system complained that the header-files in the include are wrong with this message:

Code:

What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running
kernel? [/usr/src/linux/include]

The kernel defined by this directory of header files does not have the same
address space size as your running kernel.

I'm using the default and only kernel version 2.4.20-8
As I wrote previously... Everything comes from the default CD installation.

My colleague even recompiled the kernel using these very same sources on the disk and it still comes with this message.

Code:

uname -a
Linux acermg.dsd.local 2.4.20-8 #7 Mon Mar 23 22:02:46 CET 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

I also tried the vmware-any-any-update117d, but results are the same.

I guess it has something to do with the thing being a Xeon.
Can anyone help me?

PS
I tried to turn off hyperthreading hoping to solve this issue, but alas it didn't

JaksoDebr · 03-24-2009, 06:14 PM

You need to have the kernel headers for exactly the same kernel that you are running. VMware is picky about this. On Fedora you can solve this issue by installing the appropriate kernel-devel package via yum.

Linux Archive

frater · 03-25-2009, 11:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JaksoDebr

You need to have the kernel headers for exactly the same kernel that you are running. VMware is picky about this. On Fedora you can solve this issue by installing the appropriate kernel-devel package via yum.

Yes, I understand... BUT...

It's a full Linux CD-install with the sources in one go...
The kernel-headers are even verified. On my system there was already a folder named 2.4.20-8

Code:

[root@acermg src]# ls -altr
total 20
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Jan 25  2003 debug
drwxr-xr-x   15 root     root         4096 Sep  1  2005 ..
drwxr-xr-x    7 root     root         4096 Sep  1  2005 redhat
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           14 Mar 20 15:34 linux-2.4 -> linux-2.4.20-8
drwxr-xr-x   16 root     root         4096 Mar 23 22:02 linux-2.4.20-8
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           14 Mar 24 09:49 linux -> linux-2.4.20-8
drwxr-xr-x    5 root     root         4096 Mar 24 09:49 .
[root@acermg src]# pwd
/usr/src
[root@acermg src]# uname -r
2.4.20-8

Note that the Vmware-message doesn't merely say it's a wrong version, but it says something about the address size.

My colleague (He did this many times before and I never) even build a new kernel based on the very same sources and it still doesn't work.