VMWare Workstation 6.0 and Ubuntu Hardy

May 14, 2008 by Isaac

I just finished installing VMWare Workstation 6.0.3 under Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) and ran into some issues.  During the configuration, when VMWare is compiling drivers for the system, I got an error saying "include/asm/bitops_32.h:9:2: error: #error only <linux/bitops.h> can be included directly"

From my reading this seems to be related to version 2.6.24 of the Linux kernel. The solution to this problem is actually quite easy...if you are willing to edit one of the VMWare header files. A blog post pointed me to the solution. Here is what you need to do:

1. cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
2. sudo cp vmmon.tar vmmon.tar.orig
3. sudo tar xvf vmmon.tar
4. cd vmmon-only/include/
5. sudo vi vcpuset.h
• Line 74 needs to be changed from: #include "asm/bitops.h" to: #include "linux/bitops.h"
6. cd ../../
7. sudo rm vmmon.tar
8. sudo tar cvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only/
9. sudo rm -rf vmmon-only/
10. sudo vmware-config.pl

Things should work now. Good luck.

Posted in Administration, Computer Stuff, Linux