VMWare and Gentoo Problems

By Paulus, 28 September, 2007

After installing vmware-server and vmware-modules I was not able to get vmware to start properly. When trying to start the vmware service:

# /etc/init.d/vmware start

I would get this:

* Vmware Server is installed, but it has not been (correctly) configured
* for the running kernel.
* Please ensure that the modules have been compiled for this kernel:
* emerge --oneshot vmware-modules
* Also ensure Vmware Server has been configured:
* /opt/vmware/server/bin/vmware-config.pl
* VMware is not properly configured! See above.

Reading through the Gentoo forums I tried removing the /etc/vmware/not_configured file and got:

* Starting VMware services:                                            [ ok ]
*   Virtual machine monitor                                            [ !! ]
*   Virtual ethernet                                                        [ !! ]
*   Bridged networking on /dev/vmnet0                           [ !! ]
*   Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet1 (background)    [ ok ]
*   Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet8 (background)    [ ok ]
*   NAT service on /dev/vmnet8                                      [ !! ]

I then tried:

# emerge -1 vmware-modules

unfortunately that did not work

I looked at what modules were loaded and saw that the vmmon and the vmnet modules were not loaded.

# depmod
# modprobe vmmod
# modprobe vmnet

Finally I added the following lines to the /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

vmmod
vmnet