November 29^th, 2007

Today I (again) tripped over a problem that comes up if you try to install VMWare Server on a Debian Etch AMD64 system. The problem is that vmware-ping returns a "command not found" error, even if the executable is there. That happens because vmware-ping is linked against 32-bit libraries that are usually not installed on a 64-bit system.

To install all necessary libraries execute the following command:

  apt-get install \
    ia32-libs x11-common libext6 libx11-6 \
    libx11-data libxtst6 libxslt1.1 libice6 libxrender1 \
    libsm6 lib32asound2 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 \
    lib32z1 lib32gcc1 linux32

If you need to compile the VMWare kernel modules, you can use module-assistant to install all necessary software (e.g. C compiler, kernel headers and so on):

  apt-get install module-assistant make
  m-a prepare