15 Jan, 2009
Problems installing VMware Server 2 on Ubuntu x64 – C Header files
Posted by: Rob In: Uncategorized
When running through the installation of VMware Server 2 on an Ubuntu 8.10 x64 machine, I received the following error:
What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running
kernel? [/usr/src/linux/include]
It seems the installer needs to compile a few things (vmmon, vmci, vsock and vmnet modules) and doesn’t have the neccesary C header files to do so, after faffing about I found out that you need to install the linux-headers package for your particular kernel version.
Find out your kernel version by running:
uname -r
Now search the apt-cache for the particular package that you need:
$ apt-cache search linux-headers-<your_kernel_version>
e.g.
$ apt-cache search linux-headers-2.6.27-9-generic
apt-get this package:
$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.27-9-generic
It’ll install itself to:
/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.27-9-generic
So in the VMware installer, enter:
/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.27-9-generic/include
That’s it, if you’ve installed the correct package and pointed the installer to the correct location, it will be happy and compile a couple of things.
If it complains about “linux/version.h”, then you’ve installed the incorrect package for your kernel version, so go back and double check.
