VMware 2.5.1 bug under Ubuntu 9.04

I just upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 with kernel 2.6.27-10-generic. After upgrade I wanted to reconfigure my old VMware player 2.4.x but no success because the kernel was changed a lot from version 2.6.18 to 2.6.27, so I was “forced” to switch to VMWare Player 2.5.1.

Installing was easy but configuring the new modules for the VMware player was not working at all. After some debugging I just found the vmware-modconfig crashing with “Segmentation Fault”.

$dmesg
[ 4398.256991] vmware-modconfi[29788]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f8b5617bb84 sp 00007fff5f566280 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[7f8b560fa000+168000

I tried to fix the program but I didn’t find any solution, so the best solution is to find what this program is doing or what is configuring and do that manually. Looking in the binary of vmware-modconfig I realized what this application is doing: compiling and installing the vmware modules.

Unable to load kernel module list from %s
Before you can run %s, several pre-built modules must be loaded into the running kernel.
Before you can run %s, several modules must be compiled and loaded into the running kernel.
Your kernel was compiled with gcc version %s while the version located is %s.  Compiling kernel modules with this version is not recommended.
C header files matching your running kernel were not found.  Refer to your distribution's documentation for installation instructions.
Path to kernel headers
Unable to build kernel module.
The %s module loads perfectly in the running kernel.
Can't figure out where to install the kernel module.
Trying to find a suitable %s module for your running kernel.

I just found the module sources here: /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source and I get them, unpack them and ofcourse compile them.

How to compile this vmware modules ?

I will exemplify with one module and you can apply this to all modules

1. tar -xf vmblock-only.tar.gz
2. cd vmblock-only
3. make
4. cd ..
5. cp -p vmblock.o /lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc/vmblock.ko

Do that for all modules. After that just run as root in console

# depmod -a

and restart vmware service as root

/etc/init.d/vmware restart

Now you are ready to use vmplayer.

Good luck !