After a couple different hardware problems at work, I replaced my kubuntu desktop with a new Dell Optiplex GX755. This new PC has 4gig of ram and a 250gig hard drive. A clean install of Kubuntu went down nicely and I also installed the Gnome desktop to pull in many of the Gnome tools.

With extra memory and disk space I thought I would install VMware Workstation and have a couple of different OS’s available for testing. MIT has a license agreement with VMware so I went to the MIT software page and pulled down VMware Workstation 6.5.1. I extracted the tar image however I had a problem running vmware-config.pl. The make would not compile correct and I was getting many “cant find module errors”.

I pulled down the rpm version from the MIT site, installed alien and installed the VMware Workstation RPM as a Debian package, however the install finished ok, but executing /usr/bin/vmware prompted me to rerun /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl which lead to the same problem as above.

I googled the problem and noticed that others had problems with Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.04 and VMware Workstation 6.5.1. Here is a list of others who had problems:

Finally I found VMware Workstation 6.5.2 for Linux on the VMware site and after pulling 6.5.2 down and installing the bundle, everything worked.

The bundle that I pulled down was VMware-Workstation-6.5.2-156735.i386.bundle and I executed it with this command

sh VMware-Workstation-6.5.2-156735.i386.bundle

VMware workstation 6.5.2 my problem and let me install Ubuntu Server, RHEL4 and RHEL5 in separate VM’s with no issues.