Vmware tools installation problem under RedHat ES 4

[Michael Kearey]

On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 16:29 +0200, Dony Pierre wrote:
> Hi all, 
> 
> I want to use the vmxnet driver for a guest RedHat ES version 4 running
> under a Vmware ESX server. To be able to use the vmxnet driver; I have
> to install the vmware tools. The kernel sources are not available in Red
> Hat 4, so I have install gcc, get the kernel source, install the source
> rpm with  
> 
> up2date --install gcc 
> up2date --get-source kernel 
> up2date rpm-build 
> rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.9-11.EL.src.rpm 
> 
> But when I execute ./vmware-config-tools.pl, I receive : 
> 
> What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your
> running 
> kernel? [/usr/src/linux/include] 
> 
> Do we have to build the kernel to be able to install the vmxnet driver ?
> 
> Any idea ? 
> Thanks a lot for your help. 
> Pierre. 


The release notes for RHEL4 mention this:



Note
An exploded source tree is not required to build kernel modules against
the currently in-use kernel.

For example, to build the foo.ko module, create the following file
(named Makefile) in the directory containing the foo.c file:


obj-m    := foo.o

KDIR    := /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build
PWD    := $(shell pwd)

default:
    $(MAKE) -C $(KDIR) SUBDIRS=$(PWD) modules

              

Issue the make command to build the foo.ko module.



So if the makefile were done correctly for vmxnet, it would find the
required header.

A quick solution for you may be to install the kernel-devel or kernel-
smp-devel packages:

up2date -i kernel-devel


Cheers,
Michael