Hi Folks,
Just a terse note on installing VMware Workstation on Solus. We used to have some useful references on the old forum that helped me, but those are gone. Therefore, I thought I would post some quick notes here, to help my future self and anyone else!
First of all, VMware Workstation will install fine, but will not work with the stock installation because the kernel modules will not build. To fix that you need to install a few items, as below:
sudo eopkg install -c system.devel
That will install the necessary build tools, but you need a few more items. (You might need linux-lts-headers
if you are running the lts
kernel.)
sudo eopkg install libelf-devel linux-current-headers linux-headers
It's best if you install those before you install VMware Workstation, however if you've already installed you could run this to build the modules:
sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all
You may need to restart the vmware
service to activate the modules:
sudo systemctl restart vmware.service
This seems to work for the 14.0.x and 15.0.x series (at least the ones I had tried) on the 4.x.x kernel series. However, this broke with the recent upgrade to the 5.x.x kernel. There is a solution however, found here:
https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules
Just follow the instructions provided in the README.md
and INSTALL.md
files.
It's also useful to have the USB arbitrator service running, to do that you can copy the unit files from the wiki for Arch Linux (actually that whole page has some useful information!):
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VMware#systemd_services
Hopefully I remembered everything because it's been a little while since I did that main install.