Hi - I am using Debian based Mepis 2004.03 and trying to install VMWare on it.

On my old Redhat and Mandrake system I had VMWare installed. I still have the RPM file I used to install it but I don't know how to do it on Mepis. I did rpm -ivh but it recommended I use alien. So I copied the RPM to a tmp directory and did

#alien -i vmware.rpm
#alien -d vmware
#apt-get vmware

The first 2 generated a deb file, after which i did the apt-get install vmware, and I got the following:

Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
vmwareworkstation is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 217 not upgraded.

I guess that means it installed? But I don't know how to run it - in Mandrake or RH I had to type in 'vmware' as root, but when i do that in mepis i get:

/usr/bin/vmware: line 84: /etc/vmware/locations: No such file or directory
ldd: /bin/vmware: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/vmware: line 189: /bin/vmware: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/vmware: line 189: exec: /bin/vmware: cannot execute: No such file or directory

So what do I do here? Also I saw something about Win4Lin being included with Mepis? (although i do prefer vmware) But I could've just misread? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

You're problem with the way you try to do it is that you didn't install any package at all. To do so you need to do

dpkg -i *.deb

then do

apt-get update
apt-get -f install

to make sure all dependencies are resolved

Also, next time you want to install something make to

apt-get install name_of_package

Have good Mepis day!

Install VMware using tar file not with a package install file. Also make sure you have the kernel source code and gcc compiler. You will have to load the services for VMware to work. Then you can run VMware.

You do not need to run VMware as root. Running VMware as a user is the preferred way. You should only run VMware as root if you need to change the amount of memory that VMware should take from the host OS.