I just tested the latest version of VMware Workstation for Linux on my Fedora 11 box and there are a couple of things that just bothered me.  The big picture is that it’s not working smoothly:

The problems started on install time, in order to be able to install the rpm I had to uninstall gcc! (Thanks to Tusheto for the idea ).  Then I could work as usual with your virtual machines until I tried to turn them off:  it hung forever, I gave it 5 min. before having to kill window.  The files stayed locked thanks to the vmtray that is not shown in GNOME, so if happen to have you VM’s in a external drive there is no way to cleanly unplugg it without killing the residual process.

Afer so many years working with VMware on Linux I really expected more.  Rating F

Ran my tests on Fedora 11, kernel: 2.6.30.5-43.fc11.i686.PAE, and VMware-Workstation-6.5.3-185404.i386

So I upgraded to Fedora 10 and my VMWare stoped working as expected and comented on my last post.

After testing, playing and surfing for I while I found this post which gave me some ideas.  This his how I got it working:

TERM=dumb /usr/bin/vmware-modconfig –console –install-all –icon=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/32×32/apps/vmware-workstation.png –appname=”VMware Workstation”

So have fun

After test driving the latest version of VMware Workstation: 6.5.0.  I must say that they fixed most of the small things that made it a pain in the … hard to work with or better described apt for more advanced users.  You get a straight forward RPM installation and everything just works!, you don’t have to patch it anymore.

I did just find a small problem after installing the latest Fedora 9 kernel upgrade to 2.6.27.x, as usual it didn’t start because the new kernel modules have to be built.  The GUI detected the problem, and tried to do it itself but I couldn’t find the reason why so I found two ways to make it work:

• Reinstall the rpm
• Use the following oneline:

TERM=dumb /usr/bin/vmware-modconfig –console –install-all

/etc/init.d/vmware restart

The old vmware-config.pl is gone or maybe just masked but it works as it should.