VMs( virtual machines) are the fundamental unit of the cloud. So I was interested in getting my hands around virtualization and virtual machines. Fortunately VMWare’s Workstation provides you with the opportunity. VMWare gives the user a 30 day evaluation license to evaluate Workstation 8.0.3. So I downloaded VMWare’s Workstation 8.0.3 to my desktop in Windows XP. If you had read my earlier post “Installing and configuring Fedora 16 with Windows XP using a bootable USB” I had a dual boot desktop running either XP or Fedora 16.
Installing and getting Workstation 8.0.3 started was a breeze. I then created a VM using the Fedora 16 ISO file which I had downloaded for creating the dual boot Fedora & XP. The Workstation created a VM for me in a couple of minutes. As before the VM running Fedora 16 has LiveCD in its top right corner. Or in other words it is running the OS of a virtual CD. Anyway it was great and seemed really easy to get started.
The Ugly: I wanted to do more things with the VM. I read up the documentation on “Using the WorkStation” etc. I wanted to install the VMWare Tools, clone a VM, save a snapshot etc. When I tried to install Vmware Tools I got a message saying the CDRom was in use. I checked the setting and found the CDRom was being used to boot Fedora. I actually needed to “install to disk”. . As in previous post I decided I needed to create free space. Unfortunately I got ahead of myself I think. While the workstation was running I tried to access Windows Disk Management. This took a long time and I also got a message saying that the device was busy. As an afterthought it appears perfectly reasonable as the Workstation must have allocated space for the VM on the disk and must have held the disk. My disk had a primary partition C: drive with Win XP, a free logical drive D: and a partition holding my Fedora 16. I foolishly deleted drive D: This is where all hell broke loose. This took a long time. When I opened Disk Management again I found that the values it was showing was out of whack. It was C: drive 1820 GB when it should have been 70GB. D:drive as 2087 GB and also sorts vague figures. I realized that I had messed up my disk.
Here a thought struck me. Maybe if I restart the system the OS will work things out. But alas when I rebooted I got this
error: No such partition
grub rescue>
I knew I had really messed up. I could not boot my system. As I had mentioned before I could not boot Windows from my CD drive as it did not work. After trying a couple of different things I tried to boot with my USB drive.
Thank God I was able to boot Fedora. I then used fdisk to see my partitions. I realized I had clobbered my 2nd partition which was showing an incorrect size. I used fdisk to set the size right. I then installed Fedora 16 on my PC by writing to disk. Unfortunately I lost my XP drive and I was left with a Linux only PC. Thanks to my fortune there was no data that I had lost. This was a new PC which I had got.
The Bad: Now with Fedora 16 up and running I decided I thought I will try to install Workstation 8.0.3 on Fedora 16. I downloaded Workstation 8.0.3 bundle and extracted it. But when it tried to run it I ran into my 1st problem.
Cannot load module pk-gtk-module & canberra-gtk-module and I also got a message “Failed”
So with some googling I found that I needed to do
yum install PackageKit-gtk-module &
yum install libcanberra-gtk2 libcanberra-gtk3 libcanberra-gtk2.i686 libcanberra-gtk3.i686
I also got the message that some kernel files needed to be compiled. When I went and checked
/lib/modules/3.1.0-7.fc16.i686 I founf that the “build” link was broken. So I set off on another google search on how to fix the fedora build broken situation. Finally I found the answer here
I did a
yum install kernel-devel
As mentioned in the link above I rebooted the system. This seemed to create
/lib/modules/3.3.7-1.fci6.686.
The build in this directory was fine. Also giving uname -a showed that the kernel was updated to the new version.
I tried to start the Workstation 8.0.3 again. Now the number of complaints was less. I got a message saying the files needed to be compiled. When I clicked ok it went through the compilation process. I knew I was making progress. But anyway it once again bailed out with
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module “pk-gtk-module”: libpk-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module “canberra-gtk-module”: libcanberra-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
It appears that there is a patch which needs to be applied to fix the kernel. I used the following from this post
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/343441/
I downloaded workstation-8.0.2-linux3.2patch (15K) and ran the commands
cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
tar xfv vmnet.tar
patch -p0 < ~/workstation-8.0.2_linux-3.2.patch
tar cfv vmnet.tar vmnet-only/
vmware-modconfig –console –install-all
Though my workstation 8.0.3 this went through fine.
I also did
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
I started the workstation 8.0.3 and lo and behold it finally came up.
I then downloaded Fedora 17 ISO file (http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options( and created a VM with that. My PC with about ~ 1G ram groaned. It tool nearly 20 mins to be up and running.
The searching and fixing took me nearly 7 – 8 hours. I was finally able to get workstation 8.0.3 up and running with Fedora 17 VM
Also do take a look at the good part of VMWare Workstation 8.0.3 : Sneak preview of Windows 8 with VMWare Workstation 8.0.3
Giga thoughts ... 
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