Installing VMWare Workstation 6.0 on Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy”

As a general rule, I don’t install applications on my system outside of the package manager. It litters your system with mysterious files that cannot be traced to any particular piece of software, and eventually the files will conflict with packaged files or other manually-installed software. Therefore, Ubuntuforums’ instructions on how to install VMWare Workstation 6.0 are useless to me. But it turns out it’s relatively easy to convert VMWare’s .rpm to a .deb and install VMWare inside the package manager. Here’s how:

  1. Make sure you have the kernel headers and compiler first, with: 
    sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential gcc-3.4
  2. Download VMWare Workstation 6.0 from their site in .rpm format, and get a serial number from them while you’re at it.
  3. Convert the .rpm to a .deb with 
    fakeroot alien VMware-workstation-6.0.*.rpm
  4. Install the .deb with 
    sudo dpkg -i vmwareworkstation_6.0.*.deb
  5. Edit /etc/vmware/locations as root and add the following three lines:
    1. Just after 
      answer BINDIR /usr/bin

      add

      answer SBINDIR /usr/sbin
    2. Just after 
      remove_answer BINDIR
answer BINDIR /usr/bin

      add

      remove_answer SBINDIR
answer SBINDIR /usr/sbin
  6. Run vmware-config.pl (and answer the questions accordingly; this hasn’t really changed since VMWare 4.5) with 
    sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl
  7. Unzip the EULA, which VMWare expects to be uncompressed but which is installed compressed: 
    sudo gunzip /usr/share/doc/vmware/EULA.gz

That’s it! VMWare runs fine. Sure would be nice if VMWare would provide .deb format packages for their software, though. And it sure would be nice if Ubuntuforums didn’t have stupid (and potentially dangerous) instructions on their wiki. I’ve updated the wiki page with these better instructions, we’ll see how long it lasts.

Update 2008-03-18: I’ve been converted to the VirtualBox camp, which is almost as good as VMWare. It’s also free, and therefore in Ubuntu’s package management system, so it’s pretty much guaranteed to install and upgrade painlessly (barring any packaging mistakes). Buh-bye, VMWare.