Life after daylight: Installing VMWare Player on Ubuntu 12.04

I am still customizing my Ubuntu environment and every day is something new :) This time is VMWare Player. Mostly I use this to power up Virtual Windows machines to do some testing and to execute some proprietary software.

First, download the latest version of VMWare Player from here. At the time of this post the latest version was 4.0.4 and I used the 32 version. It should be the same if you have the 64 bit one. You might need to register in order to download the file and once you have it. It will probably be downloaded as .txt so you will have to rename it to .bundle

In order to run the installer we need to download some dependencies. To do that we execute this:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

Once all the dependencies are installed we need to give the installer execution permissions. We do that using this command:

chmod +x VMware-Player-4.0.4-744019.i386.bundle

Then we execute it:

sudo VMware-Player-4.0.4-744019.i386.bundle

At this point the installation window should show up and you just follow it

Starting installation

VMware stadistics

Checking for updates

Ready to install

Installing

Installation completed

At this point VMware is installed but If you try to execute it, you will get the next error

we need to patch it

VMware error

To make it run on Ubuntu 12.04 we need to patch it. To do so we download the patch and edit it before we apply it just to reflect the version we are using. So let's do it

sudo apt-get install patch
wget http://webupd8.googlecode.com/files/vmware802fixlinux320.tar.gz
tar -xvf vmware802fixlinux320.tar.gz

We have have downloaded the patch and unpacked it. Now we need to edit the patch-modules_3.2.0.sh file. Change the plreqver value to the version you are installing in this case 4.0.4, save it and close it.