Friday 26 September 2014

How to install VM player on Ubuntu 14.04

How to install  VM player on Ubuntu 14.04


Introduction

VMware Player allows you to run entire operating systems in a virtual machine, which runs on top of Ubuntu or Windows. To the guest operating system (the one running inside the virtual machine), it appears as though it were running on its own PC. The host operating system runs the VMware Player, which provides the guestwith resources like network access. It can be downloaded for free from VMware.
Virtual machines configured with an operating system and applications ready to perform a specific function are called virtual appliances. An appliance can be created using certain VMware products, or you can download ready-made appliances. A wide variety of appliances (both certified and other-wise) are available from VMware's Appliance Marketplace.
If you are a Windows (or other operating system) user looking for an official Ubuntuappliance to run, you will want to read only the last section.
If you are an Ubuntu user who wishes to install or use the VMware Player software, continue reading.

Installing VMware Player on Ubuntu 14.04

  1. Install required packages build-essential and linux-headers:
    1. sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
  2. Download the latest VMware player e.g. VMware-Player-6.0.2-1744117.x86_64.bundle (download the bundle version, not the rpmone) and run it as root using gksudo. You'll get a graphical installer that installs VMware player for you.
  • gksudo bash ~/Downloads/VMware-Player-6.0.2-1744117.x86_64.bundle
Note: this assumes the location of your Downloads folder is /home/$USER/Downloads. *If nothing appears, you may need to make the file executable. You can do so with this command:
chmod +x ~/Downloads/VMware-Player-6.0.2-1744117.x86_64.bundle
(again, with the assumption of your Downloads folder location). After completion, VMware player is installed and should show up in the menu under ApplicationsSystem ToolsVMware Player (for Unity users, it should come up in the search results for vmware player).
As well, you may notice that when trying to create a new virtual machine, vmware player will complain on the terminal output(if it was started from the terminal as vmplayer) that:
VMware Player is installed, but it has not been (correctly) configured for your running kernel. To (re-)configure it, your system administrator must find and run "vmware-config.pl". For more information, please see the VMware Player documentation.
vmware-config.pl is not present anymore in the latest vmware-player versions (seems to have been superseded by vmware-modconfig). If you have this problem you may instead need to check if you have a /etc/vmware/not_configured file and, if so, delete it.

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