Running VMWare on Debian etch for x86

Last week, I installed Debian etch on a HP x64 workstation based on an Intel Xeon processor. Debian offers an impressive support for a vast range of HW platforms, so I could readily install a 64 bit version of GNU/Linux using the netinst image.

Next, I tried to install VMWare Workstation, and everything seemed to go fine: kernel modules compiled (after installing the relevant kernel-headers package) and installed without problems. I could even successfully create a virtual machine, but when I tried to run it, it refused with a sad box message “Failed to connect to peer process”. .

With some investigation, I could identify the root cause of the issue. Indeed, the vmware executable was not able to find the following libraries: libX11.so.6, libXtst.so.6, libXext.so.6, libXrender.so.1, libXau.so.6, libXdcmp.so.6, as a quick check with ldd showed. Actually, I was forewarned of this problem when running the vmware-config.pl script, but I downplayed that message because I was sure that those libraries were installed on my system and actually accessible.

Well, the problem turned into why those libraries were not recognized and how to fix that. The reason was pretty clear: vmware is a 32 bit executable needing 32 bit libraries, and those 32 libraries were not installed on my 64 bit system. A quick check in Debian site allowed me to find a package containing a set of 32 bit system libraries, so I only had to execute the command
sudo aptitude install ia32-libs
and everything was fine again.