VMware vmplayer failing to launch VM on Ubuntu: "Could not open /dev/vmmon"

Question

I get the following error when trying to launch an ova VM using VMPlayer on Ubuntu 12.04

Could not open /dev/vmmon: No such file or directory. Please make sure the kernel module 'vmmon' is loaded

I checked with lsmod and it was indeed not loaded. When i try to load the module using "modprobe -v vmmon", i get the following error:-

insmod /lib/modules/3.5.0-37-generic/misc/vmmon.ko
FATAL: Error inserting vmmon (/lib/modules/3.5.0-37-generic/misc/vmmon.ko): Invalid module format

Then I found from the VMware forums the following suggestion:-

sudo mv /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary.old 
sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all --appname="VMware Player" --icon="vmware-player"

This does a lot of compilation, which I guess is to compile the module again, but I get the following output at the end of it:-

Starting VMware services:
   Virtual machine monitor                                            failed
   Virtual machine communication interface                             done
   VM communication interface socket family                            done
   Blocking file system                                                done
   Virtual ethernet                                                    done
   VMware Authentication Daemon                                        done
Unable to start services

After this I get the same error as the start of the whole process. This has got me completely stumped for 2 days now, any help will be highly appreciated :(

Answer 1

uninstall it as root, and reinstall. this will likely fix the issue for you.