[EN][VMware 7.1.3][SuSE 11.3][KDE 4.4.4 rel 3] VMware can not launch as normal after update

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1

Greetings !!

I used VMware for teachings purposes with my students and we have had a big trouble recently with VMware 7.1.3 in the kde environment.

The first strange thing appeared with the widget Battery Monitor that indicated “battery not present” as the computer (hp 6720s) was just charged from the power supply we all believed that this was not possible.

acpi -b returns: Battery 1: discharging, 73%, 01:34:20 remaining

That demonstrates we were right.

I did an update but can’t remember when, and I really don’t know what went wrong because now I can’t switch user (alt+F7…) no more.
The worse, vmware won’t work anymore !! The icon is jumping and nothing more and I can’t find any log to be awared of what went wrong.

My kernel is 2.6.34.7-0.7-desktop, needed to have my wifi card working… I used the broadcomwl driver to make it work. I may take a little time to recompile the kernel and include it but right now I’m overbusy and can’t take risk to loose my time with such procedure if it failed. I got the next holliday break to do it ^^

I could open vmware one or two times but I don’t know with which miracle: the battery monitor was indicating the charge level I don’t know if this is linked. I was believing it was because the network wasn’t on (no ip address) because once connected to the internet vmware worked… but this is strange, I really don’t know why vmware don’t want to open no more…

Right now, the battery icon indicates “no battery present” and the network is on and vmware can not be opened (only network config works).

In the /dev folder I can see vsock, vmci,vmmon, vmnet0 (I use only this one for bridging)…

I have sent a request to the VMware crew and tried uninstall (wasn’t easy) and reinstall (wasn’t easy too) vmware and now it shows the same behaviour.

As this issue started as I saw the battery monitor widget showing no battery present (my laptop is old but I know the battery is ok) I strongly believe it may be linked… but I’m sure of nothing.

Thank you in advance if you took time to participate if you ever experienced such issue.

2

Did you reinstall VMware? If you had a kernel update VMware must be relinked to the new kernel.

I think the problem with the battery widget is a separate problem.

3

Yes I reinstalled the VMware application, the installer log told me:

Starting VMware services:
VMware USB Arbitrator done
Virtual machine monitor done
Virtual machine communication interface done
VM communication interface socket family done
Blocking file system done
Virtual ethernet done
Shared Memory Available done
Built vmmon module
Built vmnet module
Built vmblock module
Built vmci module
Built vsock module

There is a lot of lines in the /var/log/vmware-installer and I really don’t know where vmware logs errors or warnings.

4

Is this VMWare Workstation?

What version of VMWare?

5

As the title says: workstation 7.3.1

Really don’t know what is goin’ on and again no logs to check what is wrong with this.
In the VMWare support there is nothing yet in answer to my questions.

Still diggin’ ^^

6

How can I interpret this, even if I had to wait 22h30 to have my battery recognized by this widget ?

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and then

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and

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As you can see, once this widget is displayed as detected the battery, vmware works really better !!!

So, the question is, how can I be sure to have this widget work better ?
My battery is ok, for sure I’m not full concerning the battery cycle time (about 3h at the beginning and now 2h30 at full charge) but I have no problem to say this battery is ok. The widget can not (at random) detect the battery and when it happens vmware can not work !!

7

Wasn’t sure it was Workstation or Player.

Workstation 7.1.3 worked fine for me with KDE 4.4, 4.5 and now 4.6.

Could be you are missing a dependency?

I always install Gnome, even though I use KDE, because Workstation requires some packages from Gnome. To save time updating individual packages after kernel updates I always install Gnome and Kernel developement patterns using Yast. Overkill, I know, but is saves headaches for me.

8

I really believe this is rather a dbus and/or hal issue concerning messages that are not correctly sent to the Widget Battery Monitor.
I’m diggin’, I hit the kde support crew and waiting for a workaround, I never had such tuff issue and I’m wondering if I better reinstall/restore the system, but that’s the extreme resort…

9

The issue is clearly OS related, with the livecd the Battery Monitor is working ok.
The isolation of this issue turns around hal/dbus messages that sometimes are sent correctly to the Plasma Widget called Battery Monitor.

I’m trying to understand how dbus/hal are working but I’m currently unable to find a way to:

first: have hald working instead of haldaemon (I got /usr/bin/hald --daemon=yes when ps aux | grep hal). When trying to add a device the system says hal is not ready or not installed.
second: find a way to add the battery device enumerated by the command upower -e

The strangeness of this issue is that randomly (as I never reproduce it, you will guess it) the Battery Monitor work, six times since last friday, on a set of reboot/shutdown at least two a day…
That indicates that hal/dbus can send the message (the fact that the battery is present) to the Widget.

What I’m trying to do is to “force” this message to be sent but I have a real poor knowledge of hal/dbus… (abstraction is confusion)

At very very last resort I could try a repair of the system but I really dislike such method we are linuxians not windowsians…

10

As a workaround I first boot the computer to run level 3 (inittab) then startx and I have always the same behaviour regarding Battery Monitor.
After thinking a little about this situation I set off the flag ‘B’ for haldaemon (by yast) and now all is back ok.

I rebooted two times to be sure.
Now I can say that this issue is solved.
And by the way, how set the title of this thread to [SOLVED] ?