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#1 2013-06-16 08:59:05

ft1
Member
Registered: 2013-06-15
Posts: 3

Installation in VMware player

Help, please! I'm pretty new to Arch Linux, and I really like the spirit of the project, but I'm miserably failing in my attempt to get a running system installed in a VMware virtual test machine hmm.
I followed the instructions described in the wiki Installation Guide, which worked well more or less (I had to figure out what's missing by myself), after a few days try-and-fail I was able to log in a freshly installed Arch Linux in the command line (don't have a desktop manager yet).
As a next step I started to install the Open VM Tools, which turned out to be a bit more complicated.
I realize those tools are not even tested on Arch Linux (quite sure they would work fine on other distributions), and the wiki instructions here seem to be outdated, too.
I run

pacman -S open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-modules

to install the Open VM Tools, and that worked without errors or warnings, but then I also had to install net-tools and networkmanager, which are not listed as dependencies but are required by the suspend/resume/poweron/poweroff script located at /etc/vmware-tools/scripts/vmware/network to work. Also in this same script, I had to change a reference to /etc/rc.d/network into /usr/lib/network/network (there is no folder /etc/rc.d on my system), and the network interface on my virtual machine is not called eth0 but ens33, so I replaced a regular expression pattern /^eth/ into /^e/. Then I edited my /usr/lib/systemd/system/vmtoolsd.service and added the line KillSignal=SIGKILL under the section [Service]. This all just for the suspend/resume/poweron/poweroff script to work. As a noob, it only took me a couple of days to figure out this all. But now I can't seem to get the shared folders to work, and I don't know where to look to get this fixed. When I run

mount -t vmhgfs .host:/ /mnt/shared

I'm getting "Error: cannot mount filesystem: No such device".
My feeling is that the .host: part is unknown because something else is missing, but I don't know how to fix this and where to look to get help/info. It's frustrating sad

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#2 2013-06-16 10:33:55

Spider.007
Member
Registered: 2004-06-20
Posts: 1,175

Re: Installation in VMware player

For a noob I'd say you got pretty far big_smile The first part of your feedback seems to fit better in a bug-report then a forum post; as the open-vm-tools* seems to be a bit outdated and is missing all of archlinux' latest changes (such as persistent-net-rules).

As for the 'no such device' message; what is the output of the vmware-hgfsclient command? Also; does lsmod confirm you have succesfully loaded the vmhgfs module?

Last edited by Spider.007 (2013-06-16 10:35:57)

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#3 2013-06-16 11:48:53

ft1
Member
Registered: 2013-06-15
Posts: 3

Re: Installation in VMware player

Well I'm not really such a total noob, more like sort of Arch Linux newbie big_smile. ok, vmware-hgfsclient lists the names of the shared folders I configured in the host, but I can't seem to find vmhgfs in the output of lsmod. How can I load it? I tried

modprobe vmhgfs

but got "Error: could not insert 'vmhgfs': Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)".
And when i run dmesg, I get a long listing and in the end it says

Unknown symbol VMCIDatagram_Send (err 0)
Unknown symbol VMCIDatagram_DestroyHnd (err 0)
Unknown symbol VMCIDatagram_CreateHnd (err 0)

Thanks for the bug-report link, I think I'm gonna open a bug there and hope someone can fix that soon. Of course, I'd be glad to post a workaround, too, if I manage to fix the installation by myself neutral

Last edited by ft1 (2013-06-16 11:59:29)

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#4 2013-06-16 14:03:15

Spider.007
Member
Registered: 2004-06-20
Posts: 1,175

Re: Installation in VMware player

When searching for the unknown symbol messages; this seems to be already reported @ https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/35255 As said there upstream hasn't released an update yet. You might be able to build a new version yourself using the mentioned dev. snapshot.

The other issues you have with openvm-tools doesn't seem to be reported yet.

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#5 2013-06-16 19:49:22

ft1
Member
Registered: 2013-06-15
Posts: 3

Re: Installation in VMware player

Ok, thanks for your help! I opened a new bug: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/35819. Haven't tried yet to build the Open VM Tools from the snapshot, but if I make any progress I'll drop a line here. Maybe this could help someone else.

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