Installing VMware Workstation on Ubuntu
Published on 22 Mar 2006 · Filed in Explanation · 208 words (estimated 1 minutes to read)Once I’d gotten Ubuntu up and running on my HP nc8230 laptop, the next order of business was—due to business needs—get a copy of Windows XP Professional running under VMware Workstation on Ubuntu. While I’m not a huge Windows fan (I prefer Mac OS X and Linux to Windows, generally), I also recognize the need for Windows in a world where your customers all run Windows.
I’d never installed VMware Workstation on a Linux host before, so this would be a new experience for me. It couldn’t be that hard, right? Well, it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped it would be, that’s for sure.
In order to get VMware Workstation 5.5.1 to install on Ubuntu 5.10, here’s what I had to do:
-
Copy the VMware Workstation 5.5.1 software onto the machine.
-
Using
apt-get, install gcc, g++, and the appropriate Linux headers. -
Untar the VMware Workstation software and run the installation script. When prompted, go ahead and compile a custom vmmon module.
That should do it. One site I found while preparing for this also suggested installing the “build-essential” package, but I didn’t install this and VMware Workstation seems to run just fine.
Coming up soon: installation of Solaris x86 under VMware Workstation running on Ubuntu Linux!