Ubuntu Unleashed

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions about how to install the free VMware Server on an Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free).

Build Environment

Make sure you have the needed build environment and tools to compile the vmware modules for the kernel.

aptitude install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

aptitude install xinetd

Downloading VMware Server

Vmware Server can be downloaded from:

http://www.vmware.com/download/server/

After accepting the EULA grab the vmware server .tgz file (around 102MB).

Note: As of right now VMware Server won't compile correctly on Feisty without patching the vmmon file.

Patch information can be found here: http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=76957&tstart=0

The patch can be downloaded here: http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/vmware-any-any-update109.tar.gz

Installing VMware Server

Untar the VMware Server package:

tar -xzf /Path/To/VMware-server-1.0.3-xxx.tar.gz

Change into the install directory:

cd vmware-server-distrib

Run the installer:

sudo vmware-install.pl

Choose defaults to questions until it asks:

Before running VMware Server for the first time, you need to configure it by invoking the following command: "/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl". Do you want this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]

Enter no and quit the install. To install the patch cd back to your start directory:

cd ..

Untar the patch:

tar xvzf /Path/To/vmware-any-any-update109.tar.gz

Enter the directory:

cd vmware-any-any-update109

Run the patch script:

sudo ./runme.pl

It should prompt you to run vmware-config.pl, choose yes at this time. If it doesn't you can always run the config script manually:

sudo vmware-config.pl

Again you can hit enter to choose the defaults to all the questions, though you will probably want to manually choose which networking features you want. To access the server run

vmware

for the VMware Server Console.