Installation of VMware-Player-4.0.0-471780.i386.bundle on my (almost) default Slackware 13.37 32 bit is failing and it is not giving me much hints:

It fails also in an root X session. Does anybody has any experience on how to deal with this?

as root -
sh VMware-$NAME-$VERSION.bundle --console --ignore-errors

VmMare expects certain -isms from other distros to be present. This allows VMware to gracefully error on non critical events.

10 members found this post helpful.

That just worked! Thank you!

You'll have issues if you install the VMware Tools on Slackware guests.
VMware expects to see an /etc/pam.d directory, (you can just create this empty directory).

Theres a flaw is in the installation script which calls mkinitrd -h (expecting it to return help). On Slackware mkinitrd -h specifies the hibernation location. When/IF you decided to use VMware Tools on a Slackware guest, you can edit the installation $NAME.pl file, and replace mkinitrd -h with mkinitrd --help.

Or, optionally, not use VMware tools at all. Slackware already includes a mouse and graphics driver for VMware guests. You will have to disable compositing in Xorg though if you expect to run KDE on the guest VM. Search this forum, its been posted a few times

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Not only is LQ answering my questions, it is also anticipating them :-)

Yes I did try KDE (as it happens to be my favorite DE) and it crashed. Nevertheless, I am not fussy when I am working on a Virtual Machine and I am happy also with XFCE, but since you mentioned it, I persisted. So after some investigations, I started XFCE, then ran:

$ /usr/bin/systemsettings

and disabled all the desktop effects.

This solved it.

I can report that this also works on Slackware 13.37 x86_64 with VMware-Player-4.0.1-528992.x86_64.bundle

Cheers,
Peter

Fantastic.... Just to let you all know, this also helps to get vmware-player 4.0.4 working on a Slackware64 13.37

Great!!!

This solution also works on Slackware 14.0 with VM Player 5.0.1

# sh VMware-Player-5.0.1-894247.i386.bundle --console --ignore-errors

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This workaround also works for Slackware 14.1 x86_64 with vmplayer 6.0.1

sh ./VMware-Player-6.0.1-1379776.x86_64.bundle --console --ignore-errors

Hi - this worked perfectly, but I wanted to learn more about why it works and how it works.

Where can I look up what --console and --ignore-errors is doing, and are these options / arguments passed into the *.bundle file or to the sh program?

Thanks!

It depends what you call "works", I guess.

When I do that, the installer completes (so that part works) but the end result won't actually run anything (which is a rather important part).

The vmmon and vmnet kernel modules appear to build correctly, but both of them have the added version magic of "preempt" which isn't in any other module on my system. As a result they won't load when you attempt to run /etc/init.d/vmware restart and the two services "Virtual machine monitor" and "Virtual ethernet" won't start.

Or can virtual machines be started without either of those two services running?

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