I just want to share my experience with installation of VMware Server on my Slackware Linux. I am using slackware-current with Free Rock Gnome (FRG).
The files I downloaded from VMware site on 2006-09-01 were:
\- VMware-server-1.0.1-29996.tar.gz (main server)
\- VMware-server-linux-client-1.0.1-29996.zip (server console)
\- VMware-mui-1.0.1-29996.tar.gz (web management interface)
The server installs nicely, web management interface also, the module vmmon and vmnet is built and loaded into running kernel without problems. The server package contains all necessary libraries included, so there is no need to additionally install PAM (like it is described in another articles found on the forum) or create file vmware-authd in /etc/pam.d
There is however a problem after installation of server console. It installs and configures without any errors, but when I try to run it, it just silently exits, without any message. Long time it took me debugging to find out, that I shouldn't look in syslog or /var/log/vmware directory, but rather in /tmp/vmware-root where the run log is created. After a few more hours with trying to satisfy the error messages found there, I entered an Ubuntu forum, where someone was complaining to the same problem in log with running the hal_init. The user upgraded his systems resulting in console-server stopped working.
I tried some play with different versions of my libhal (Hardware abstraction layer daemon) installed (namely with hal-0.5.7.1, hal-0.5.7 and hal-0.5.4 and none of them succeeded. Then I removed the hal lib completely and the server console started working right away.
I have to add, that installing the console on another computer and connecting to my server worked fine - the server was installed and running correctly.
I think it would be prudent to mention in console message that running the console failed and more details can be found in /tmp/vmware-yourusername/ui-yourpidnumber.id logfile. Or to log them do /var/log/vmware or through a syslog. At least those are the places I expect to find them. Or give some console switch options like -o to point to custom logfile or -d to show debug messages on console rather than to log them into file.
VMware package for Linux contains many libraries already included within, there could be libhal added too.
And in case someone was looking, here are some messages from my log:
\# cat /tmp/vmware-root/ui-20489.log
Sep 02 22:34:25: vmui| Log for VMware Server Console pid=20489 version=1.0.1 build=build-29996 option=Release
wrz 02 22:34:25: vmui| Gtk: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.4.0/engines/libclearlooks.so: undefined symbol: gdk_cairo_create
wrz 02 22:34:25: vmui| Using log file /tmp/vmware-root/ui-20489.log
wrz 02 22:34:25: vmui| HAL04LoadHALLibraries: Could not dlopen libhal.so.0.
wrz 02 22:34:25: vmui| Caught signal 11 -- pid 20489
wrz 02 22:34:25: vmui| SIGNAL: eip 0xb6ee5ef2 esp 0xbfdc1ff0 ebp 0xbfdc2008
wrz 02 22:34:25: vmui| SIGNAL: eax 0x312e313a ebx 0xb6ef7420 ecx 0x88c79e8 edx 0x88c2658 esi 0x88c5f28 edi 0x88b71f0
wrz 02 22:34:25: vmui| SIGNAL: stack 0xbfdc1ff0 : 0x08870108 0x00000011 0x00000001 0xb6ef7420
...
Important was this:
vmui| HAL04LoadHALLibraries: Could not dlopen libhal.so.0
When trying to make manually the missing symlink in /usr/lib/libhal.so.0 (which i pointed to /usr/lib/libhal.so.1) another one occured:
vmui| HAL04LoadHALLibraries: Could not dlopen libdbus-1.so.0
When I again created symlink /usr/lib/libdbus-1.so.0 -> /usr/lib/libdbus-1.so.1 the message was:
vmui| HAL: Could not load hal_initialize
And then catching signall 11 and dumping debug messages - registers, stack and backtrace.
Some references:
The same issue, but with vmplayer
http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=414671
The Ubuntu forum that guided me to a solution
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=247350
Super Pik Master