I have been running VMware player 2.0.4 since August to launch a windows XP Virtual Machine. I don’t really use the VM all that often, but when I am doing web development, I need to be able to test in IE, and thats the only way I can do it w/o rebooting to Vista *shudder*. Towards the end of September it started telling me there was an upgrade available. I went to the VMware website only to discover they had stopped providing the .tar.gz version of VMware player. My only options were .bundle or .rpm. Not really feeling like I wanted to be all that adventurous I ignored the upgrade requests. Finally after installing the latest kernel patches last night I decided to go ahead and upgrade VMware Player as well since I would have to re-compile the kernel modules again anyway for the new linux kernel. Having never tried to install and RPM on Ubuntu I was at a loss.
I started out by of course heading to Google and searching on “ubuntu install .rpm”. Amongst the search results I found a great posting on the Ubuntu Blog that went into very specific details. I followed the instructions there and as the conversion started I was given a warning by alien.
Warning: Skipping conversion of scripts in package VMware-Player: postinst prerm
Warning: Use the --scripts parameter to include the scripts.
I then stopped the alien conversion, and deleted its working directory. I then restarted it like so:
$sudo alien --scripts -k VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.x86_64.rpm
Once the command completed I then let the standard package installer do its job with the command:
$sudo dpkg -i vmware-player_2.5.1-126130_amd64.deb
The installation was plenty verbose enough for me, and kept me in the loop of everything it was doing. The installer was fully aware of my .tar previous installation, removed it without much complaint. And before long it said it was done.
Selecting previously deselected package vmware-player.
(Reading database ... 296662 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking vmware-player (from vmware-player_2.5.1-126130_amd64.deb) ...
Setting up vmware-player (2.5.1-126130) ...
Uninstalling legacy installation...
Uninstalling the tar installation of VMware Player.
Stopping VMware services:
Virtual machine monitor done
Blocking file system: done
Host network detection done
DHCP server on /dev/vmnet8 done
NAT service on /dev/vmnet8 done
Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet8 done
Virtual ethernet done
This program previously created the file /dev/vmnet7, and was about to remove
it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
This program previously created the file /dev/vmnet8, and was about to remove
it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
This program previously created the file /dev/vmnet5, and was about to remove
it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
This program previously created the file /dev/vmnet2, and was about to remove
it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
This program previously created the file /dev/vmnet0, and was about to remove
it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
This program previously created the file /dev/vmnet9, and was about to remove
it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
This program previously created the file /dev/vmnet6, and was about to remove
it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
This program previously created the file /dev/vmnet4, and was about to remove
it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
This program previously created the file /dev/vmnet3, and was about to remove
it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
This program previously created the file /dev/vmnet1, and was about to remove
it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
This program previously created the directory /var/run/vmware, and was about to
remove it. Somebody else apparently did it already.
The removal of VMware Player 2.0.4 build-93057 for Linux completed
successfully. Thank you for having tried this software.
Extracting VMware Installer...done.
Installing VMware Installer 1.0
Copying files...
Configuring...
Installing VMware Player 2.5.1
Copying files...
Configuring...
Installing VMware Player 2.5.1
Copying files...
Configuring...
Installation was successful
I was quite pleased to find that everything installed as it should, and that I now had the latest version of VMware player. All in all, an incredibly painless process, I don’t know why I dreaded it before. If you found this useful please comment below!
John's Musings 
Just about to try the same thing.
Your description looks good. There are other samples of rpm -> deb conversions but yours is relevant (I use VMWare on OSX, to run our own java software that needs to be tested in windows)
Having seen the down hill direction of MS windows over the last 15 years, I am converting all my old hardware to Linux. BUT there are not enough printer/fax/scan drivers or managers out there. So VMWare is a god send).
Ubuntu using Gnome (heavenly I must say).
I will let you know how it goes….
Peter
My CV: PCs 27 years, now OSX for 2 years, Linux 1 day 🙂
Hi,
would you mind posting the content of your /etc/vmware/networking file? (or emailing it to me)
I am using Player 2.5.2 and I am not able to get host-only networking up. It seems like the modules are just not configurated to provide host-only. I used vmware-config.pl to configure the modules in the old days, but that script is gone. I was able to find out how to rebuild the modules against the current kernel (/usr/bin/vmware-modconfig –console –install-all) but this doesn’t provide a configuration dialog where I could enable host-only.
I suspect the build script to read the network configuration from the /etc/vmware/networking file. Unfortunatly, the syntax of this file is nowhere documented (I spent hours on google) and I hope to figure it out by looking at your /etc/vmware/networking (hence you seem to have host-only up working).
Greetings,
Martin
If I recall correctly I have never gotten Host Only networking to work myself. My current images are all set to use NAT.
Contents of “/etc/vmware/networking”
VERSION=1,0
answer VNET_8_DHCP yes
answer VNET_8_DHCP_CFG_HASH 790A248948DBBB0D16F5445D6810076221DC7D37
answer VNET_8_HOSTONLY_NETMASK 255.255.255.0
answer VNET_8_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.59.0
answer VNET_8_NAT yes
answer VNET_8_VIRTUAL_ADAPTER yes
answer VNET_8_VIRTUAL_ADAPTER_ADDR 192.168.59.1