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Install vmware-player on Kubuntu

February 4th, 2009
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Next semester I need to code some programs for MINIX 3. Since I do not want to install this operating system on one of my machines I decided to use VMWare. The VMWare Player is free, and can be easily installed on Linux. At least that is what I thought…

VMWare

VMWare

Since I have installed Kubuntu on my Samsung NC10 I thought the command:

# apt-get install vmware-player

would do the trick, but it did not.

I turned out that vmware-player is not in any of the repositories. Therefore we need to install the package manually.

First download the .rpm file from the VMWare website.

Since Kubuntu works with .deb files we need to convert the .deb file into an rpm file. In order to do this we need an application called Alien. To install Alien execute:

# apt-get install alien

Next we need to convert the .rpm into a .deb file:

# alien --script -kv VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.i386.rpm

The -v is to enable verbose mode, the -k to keep the current package version (Alien normally adds one to the minor version of each package) and –script means Alien tries to convert the scripts that are meant to be run when the package is installed or removed.

The next step is to install our new .deb package into the repository:

# dpkg -i VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.i386.deb

Note: During this procedure you might think the whole process hangs, just wait (even when you do not hear your harddisk anymore), the installation just takes a while!

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  1. Marthijn
    February 4th, 2009 at 21:11 | #1
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    Thanks for this tutorial!
    – Marthijn

  2. WK
    February 8th, 2009 at 23:48 | #2
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    Isn’t easier to use virtualbox? It is available for (K)ubuntu and its much friendlier, IMHO

  3. Bas
    February 9th, 2009 at 08:48 | #3
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    Well I guess it is. But, for my MINIX assignment the university provided a vmware image. Therefore I needed to have vmware player up and running. Besides I tried to install minix in virtualbox but it did not detect the network card since they emulate another card than vmware.

    Gr, Bas

  4. Luke
    February 20th, 2009 at 20:51 | #4
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    hi there, does your NC10 run vmware ok? im considering buying one for development ‘on-the-move’ as it were… and use vmware images a lot.

    cheers,

    Luke

  5. Bas
    February 20th, 2009 at 21:41 | #5
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    @Luke: it works nice but I use it for MINIX 3 which is quite a lightweight operating system. I do not think you should trust your NC10 for running VMWare images of Linux distributions of Windows installations…

  6. Luke
    February 21st, 2009 at 10:41 | #6
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    thanks for the reply… still researching, even with more ram it could still be a problem i think with the atom processor. maybe in a few months they’ll bring out a new model! cheers.

  7. Bas
    February 21st, 2009 at 13:08 | #7
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    I guess a netbook is not really suitable for running heavy CPU applications like VMWare ;)

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