Bob Brandt's Projects Site | Linux / Installing VMWare on SuSE Linux

VMWare Server 2.0 +

Since VMware Server 2.0.0 has been released things have significantly changed! The previous issues have more or less vanished, but introduced a couple new issues. I found Swerdna's site which descibes exactley how to install VMware Server on SuSE. And I have verified that it works perfectly on SLED10sp2. It may be a little heavy handed, but it works everytime.

The only issue I still had was with PAM authentication. I needed to change the default /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd file as follows:

#%PAM-1.0
#auth       required    pam_unix.so shadow nullok
#account    required    pam_unix.so
auth       include      common-auth
account    include      common-account

Easy as Pie!

VMWare Server 1.5

First step is to install the VMWare as normal.

However there are two problems with VMware server The first is with the Linux VMWare Server Console. The second is with USB support.

To fix the problems with Linux VMWare Server Console, run the commands:

cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0
mv libpng12.so.0 libpng12.so.0.old
ln -sf /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0
cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.old
ln -sf /lib/libgcc_s.so.1

To fix the USB problem, you can either run the command:

mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb

Or edit the fstab file with the following line:

usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0

Another problem I have run into was after a few months I found that USB devices were unable to connect to a Windows XP guest OS. When I would looks at the device in Windows Device Manager it would say "This device cannot start Code(10)" Researching the problem, I found that the there is some hiccup between the SuSE kernel and VMWare. I was able to solve the problem (temporarily anyway) by changing the BIOS settings for the USB ports to 1.1. Problem is that this is not available on all BIOS.

References: