Installing VMware Player on Ubuntu 13.10

I mostly choose Vmware Player as virtualization platform. There is one more Virtualization tool available "VitualBox". I have used "VirtualBox" also, but due to lack of networking options I do not prefer to use "VirtualBox".

Vmware Player provides good options for networking like Bridge network, host only and Natted. I prefer to use Natted, as all Guest OS can communicate with each other, with Host OS and with Internet too.

When I started installation of VMware Player in Ubuntu 13.10, I got some errors. When I checked "dmesg" I found that there was segmentation fault error with one of the library file.

I searched on Internet, and then I found that the problem was not with any library file but with the Kernel.

Ubuntu 13.04 is having kernel 3.11.0-12-generic, while VMware do not support this kernel version. So finally searching from some of the forum I found below steps to overcome issue of VMware Player installation on Ubuntu 13.10.

First you need to download VMware player for Ubuntu from Vmware website. I got "VMware-Player-5.0.2-1031769.x86_64.bundle" for me.

Now before we start installation, we need to install prerequisites. Use below command.

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

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Then install Vmware Player using below command.

sudo chmod a+x VMware-Player-5.0.2-1031769.x86_64.bundle && sudo ./VMware-Player-5.0.2-1031769.x86_64.bundle

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You will see progress of installation, and it will finish. But when you start Vmware Player, it will ask to install some modules. When you click on "Install" button, it will show you "Send Crash Report".

Now follow below steps to solve your issue.

	sudo su
	cd /tmp
	wget https://github.com/willysr/SlackHacks/raw/master/vmware/vmware-3.11/vmblock.3.11.patch
	cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
	tar -xvf vmblock.tar
	cd vmblock-only
	patch -p1 < /tmp/vmblock.3.11.patch
	cd ..
	tar -cvf vmblock.tar vmblock-only/
	vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

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Once done, you can start VMware Player without any issue.

Hope this will help, who wants to run VMware Player in Ubuntu 13.10.