Installing Sun VirtualBox 3.0.12 and VMware Workstation 7 on Fedora 11 x86_64

Marko Vojinovic vvmarko at gmail.com
Mon Nov 23 11:32:33 UTC 2009


On Monday 23 November 2009 10:29:55 Mr. Teo En Ming (Zhang Enming) wrote:
> VMware Server 2 is not compatible with Fedora 11 x86_64, i.e. kernels
> 2.6.29.4 and up. So don't bother to try compiling vmmon modules for VMware
> Server.
> 
> If you encounter problems while compiling the vboxdrv and vmmon kernel
> modules, it may be that your local kernel source tree is not properly
> configured.
> 
> In my case:
> 
> # cd /lib/modules/2.6.30.5-enming.teo
> 
> # rm build (symbolic link)
> 
> # ln -s /usr/src/kernels/linux-2.6.30.5 build
> 
> # rm source (symblic link)
> 
> # ln -s /usr/src/kernels/linux-2.6.30.5 source
> 
> Go to your kernel source tree. Some kernel header files may not be present.
> 
> # cd /usr/src/kernels/linux-2.6.30.5
> 
> If .config exists,
> 
> # make oldconfig
> 
> # make prepare
> 
> This will generate the missing kernel headers.

Why not just

   yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

or "yum install kernel-headers", which is apparently included in the above 
group?

> For VirtualBox,
> 
> # /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
> 
> Above step will recompile linux kernel modules for VirtualBox. There will
>  be 3 kernel modules.
> 
> To load the vboxdrv kernel module,
> 
> # /etc/init.d/vboxdrv start

If you did the yum thing above *before* installing VirtualBox, there is no 
need for these steps. Otherwise they are needed, at least I remember doing the 
first one.

I wouldn't know about VMware, gave up on it after having too much trouble with 
kernel drivers. VirtualBox appears to provide equivalent functionality, and is 
(mostly) open source, so I don't expect the same trouble with building kernel 
modules. ;-)

HTH, :-)
Marko




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