How to install VMWare Player on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

VMWare is a commercial virtualization software like VirtualBox. With these software you may install and run other operating system on a working OS. For example if you are using Ubuntu Hardy Heron, then you can install Windows Vista or Windows 7 inside your Ubuntu machine, without a dual boot way.

Based on Ubuntu official website, VMware Player allows you to run entire operating systems in a virtual machine, which runs on top of Ubuntu or Windows. To the guest operating system (the one running inside the virtual machine), it appears as though it were running on its own PC. The host operating system runs the VMware Player, which provides the guest with things like network access. VMware Player is available from Ubuntu’s Multiverse repository (in 6.06 LTS through 7.04), but is not included in Ubuntu 8.04/8.10. It can be downloaded for free from VMware.

This tutorial will show you how to install VMWare Player on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Please continue reading.

1. Install required packages build-essential, linux-kernel-headers and linux-kernel-devel

Type this command inside your terminal.

sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-kernel-headers linux-kernel-devel

2. Download the latest VMware player e.g. VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.i386.bundle (download the bundle version, not the rpm one) and run it as root using gksudo. You’ll get a graphical installer that installs VMware player for you.

gksudo bash ./VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.i386.bundle

3. If nothing happen, you need to make the file you’ve just downloaded executable. You can do so with this command:

chmod +x ./VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.i386.bundle

When installation finished, VMware player is installed and you can start using VMWare Player from Applications ? System Tools ? VMware Player.