A blog reader has asked me how to get the VMware workstation WS 12.5.9 running again after he installed and updated Leap to version 15.1 on some older hardware. The reader referred to my article on running Win 10 as a VMware guest on an Opensuse Leap system.
Upgrading Win 7 to Win 10 guests on Opensuse/Linux based VMware hosts – I – some experiences
There I mentioned that the latest VMware WS version does not run on older hardware … Then yu have to use VMware WS 12.5.9. But not only during your initial VMware installation but also after kernel updates on a Leap 15.1 system you are confronted with an error message similar to the following one, when the VMware WS modules must be (re-) compiled:
I have actually written about this problem in 2018. But I admit that the relevant article is somewhat difficult to find as it has no direct reference to Leap 15.1. See:
This article has a link to a VMware community article with a remedy to the mentioned problem:
https://communities.vmware.com / message / 2777306#2777306
The necessary steps are the following:
wget https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules/archive/workstation-12.5.9.tar.gz tar -xzf workstation-12.5.9.tar.gz cd vmware-host-modules-workstation-12.5.9 make make install
and
cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 mv libfontconfig.so.1 libfontconfig.so.1.old ln -s /usr/lib64/libfontconfig.so.1
All credits are due to the guys “Kubecek” and “portsample”. Thx!