Installing VMware Player 4.0.4 on Ubuntu 12.04

19th June 2012 22 By Simon

With my recent migration away from Windows to Ubuntu I decided to install VMware player to my machine, unfortunately this isn’t as straight forward as it is under Windows but it’s actually not too difficult if you follow these instructions.

First of all download VMware Player from the VMware site (registration is required but it’s free anyway).

Download

VMware Player Download

Choose the required version, please note that these are .bundle files but your browser may change the name.

Next you need to download and extract the following patch to your home directory, for more information please see http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/2012/01/26/vmware-workstation-8-0-2-player-4-0-2-fix-for-linux-kernel-3-2-and-3-3/.

Once extracted you will need to edit the patch-modules_3.2.0.sh file to make the following changes.

Open up terminal

Installing 01

patch-modules_3.2.0.sh 01

patch-modules_3.2.0.sh 02

You can see that I have changed the version check from 4.0.2 to 4.0.4. Now we need to make the script executable

Using terminal type in

chmod +x patch-modules_3.2.0.sh

And now we are going to make the .bundle file executable, type in

chmod +x VMware-Player-4.0.4-744019.x86_64.bundle

The next step is to install VMware Player, type in

sudo ./VMware-Player-4.0.4-744019.x86_64.bundle

This will launch the installer.

VMware Player Installer_01

Accept the license terms

VMware Player Installer_02

Click Next

VMware Player Installer_03

Click Install

VMware Player Installer_04

VMware Player Installer_05

Click Close.

Now before starting VMware Player you need to install the Ubuntu Patch module.

From the terminal type

sudo apt-get install patch

apt-get-install-patch

Now you need to install the patch fix, type in

sudo ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh

If you have run the same patch on version 4.0.2 or 4.0.3 before, you may get this error: “/usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/.patched found. You have already patched your sources. Exiting”. If you do see it just delete the /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/.patched file and try again.

Once successfully patched you can launch VMware Player.

End User License Agreement_020

Accept the licence agreement.

VMware Player_01

About VMware Player_022

Here you can see VMware Player 4.0.4 successfully installed and running.