VMware Workstation 9 kernel modules for Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal – Instructions for boot error and kernel patch 9

This morning i have upgraded my laptop to Xubuntu Quantal Quetzal and i have come across a boot error after reboot. A black screen complaining about vmware modules.

There is a 9.0.1 update that solves this problem and officially supports Ubuntu 12.10 as a host/guest

Here’s the fix.

1- Keep calm, you have not lost your system. You can just log in switching to the graphic environment using Ctrl + Alt + F6
2- Once we are logged on, we shut down the system and start it again repeatedly pressing Shift key to bring up the grub boot menu
3- We select Ubuntu alternate boot options, and boot with our previous 3.2.0 kernel. This old kernel already has working kernel modules and will allow us to perform the next steps.
4- After logging in, we open a console and, as root, run:
vmware-installer --uninstall-product=vmware-workstation
5- We then reboot the system and let it start up with normal 3.5.0 kernel
6- Now we reinstall VMware Workstation 9
7- Open a new console and, as root, we run the following commands to prevent vmware from starting up after the next reboot:
mkdir /etc/init.d/vm
mv /etc/init.d/vmware /etc/init.d/vm
mv /etc/init.d/vmware-USBArbitrator /etc/init.d/vm
mv /etc/init.d/vmware-workstation-server /etc/init.d/vm
8- Sorry mate, reboot one more time
9- Open a new console and, as root, we download the following patch for VMware Workstation 9 and kernel 3.5.0 (This is original from an ArchLinux Wiki. However it didn’t work for me under ubuntu so i made a tiny modification)
10- We will now undo the previous init scripts movement, so vmware-modconfig can find them, as they are invoked during kernel module build. As root:
mv /etc/init.d/vm/vmware /etc/init.d/
mv /etc/init.d/vm/vmware-USBArbitrator /etc/init.d/
mv /etc/init.d/vm/vmware-workstation-server /etc/init.d/
rmdir /etc/init.d/vm
11- We wipe possible previous kernel module patch lockfiles that may or may not exist.
rm /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/.patched
12- We untar the .tar.gz and run it as root. It should compile the kernel modules required by VMware Workstation 9 in order to work with Ubuntu Quantal Quetzal 12.10
13- Last reboot. Now we should have a working VMware Workstation 9 in our Ubuntu 12.10 system.