I decided to install VMware 6.5 on my Fedora Rawhide (just about at Fedora 10) machine. The binary kernel modules that are included with VMware are of little use to me because I don’t run an ancient version of the linux kernel. I used the .bundle installer to install the program. I let it run through and when it finished i was left with a problem of not being able to start VMware or VMware player because of the required kernel modules. You are going to need dependencies to build a kernel module. In Fedora, I beleive this is yum groupinstall "Development Tools" and yum install kernel-devel.
To fix this I ran the following commands:cp /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/ ~/vmware-modules – So as not to pollute the program’s installed versions of the module source.
For each tar file I untarred it and ran make in the resulting directory. This compiled all the modules i needed. After this, it is just a matter of copying the kernel modules to the appropriate place: sudo cp `find . -name "*.ko" | xargs` /lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc, running depmod -a and sudo /etc/init.d/vmware restart. After this, starting and running VMware now works. The downside to this is that you have to recompile the modules every time your kernel is updated, unless you write a script or turn those tar files into akmod rpm packages.
I don’t know if i like VMware more than VirtualBox or KVM, but if I do, I will consider writing some specfiles to automate this.
Also, if you are going to be running on a host with PulseAudio and want sound in your guests, vmwaredps-1.3.tar.gz is really helpful!