VMWare Server install on Debian Etch (amd64)

VMWare Server install on Debian Etch (amd64)

Several times I installed VMWare Server on a $ARCH amd64 variant of Debian Etch. I think there are some quite good howtos around, how to do it on Debian Sarge, e.g. Falko's VMware on Sarge Howto. Here I'll list some delicate details what you additionally have to do for running (compiling ) it on Etch.

• You need to apt-get development stuff

(This stuff has lots of dependencies to X11, so don't wonder why it gets some packages ...)

As you run a amd64 system and VMWare is a 32 bit apps, you need to have a 32 bit development stuff on the machine, too. (Booooo VMWare: The VMware app is available binary only, and can't be ported to amd64 arch by someone else than VMware people)

Get a free license code from VMware via Website, download VMware server (ATTOW version 1.0.2) and run ./vmware-install.pl in vmware-server-distrib. You may hit enter on all the shellscript's questions, there default values are just fine ecept three exceptions:

• The License of VMware has to be accepted and the serial must be entered.
• The kernel headers location must be set up. In my case I ran a 2.6.18-3-xen-vserver-amd64 kernel, so I had to set it to /lib/modules/2.6.18-3-xen-vserver-amd64/build/include
• You might want to change the default path for the virtual machine's storage to something else than "/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines" if you don't like blanks in pathnames, as I do.

Then run ./vmware-install.pl in vmware-mui-distrib which installs the agent and webserver to manage the VMs.

WMware will run nice on a AMD64 $ARCH and give you the possibility to build 64 bit guests ("VMs") as well as 32 bit guests. Go to https://<yourip>:8333 to download the (proprietary) client software and build your VMs ...