Technologists Notes

Not all that long ago I expressed optimism about hosting VMWare on Fedora (Virtual satisfaction with VMware Server and kernel 2.6.31). I should have seen the writing on the wall, but I didn’t.

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In ’93 or ’94, a friend began trying to interest me in Linux. At the time, my direct needs for UNIX(-like) systems were still satisfied by Dell SVR4. However, late in 1996 I needed to host a web server, needed it to be Linux-based, and the same friend recommended I try either Debian or Red Hat. Based on his comparison, I started with Red Hat 4.0. I continued to stay up with almost all of the Red Hat releases through Red Hat 9, and have continued with Fedora releases since then, putting almost all of the Red Hat & Fedora releases into some production use. From habit, history, and curiosity, I’ve felt compelled to continue evaluating new Fedora releases and (mostly) putting them into production for web/mail/name service once some minimal comfort level has been achieved.

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Initially getting VMware Server to work with Fedora 11 and kernel 2.6.30 was challenging, and then the roughly bi-weekly kernel builds to keep up with Fedora updates got tedious. Trying the same approach with Fedora 12 and kernel 2.6.31 didn’t work at all for me. I kept getting duplicate definitions of init_mm that caused link failures. I tried various #ifdef kludges to overcome the duplicates, but nothing seemed to work. All this proved to me was that I really didn’t want to be trying to build the kernel at all.

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VMware Communities How to install and run vmware server 1.0.9 on kernel 2.6.30 gives a pretty good recipe for getting VMware Server going on Fedora 11. (It’s terse, and doesn’t give some needed warnings, e.g., runme.pl shouldn’t run vmware-config.pl but it is harmless for it to try.)

Other recipes I’ve found don’t work, and at first I couldn’t get this one to work because it requires building a kernel from source.

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