Q I'm relatively new to Linux. I got my first distro and am very eager to install VMPlayer to test other distros, but the installation instructions do not work for me. I've unpacked the file VMware-player-1.0.1-19317.tar.gz. The unpacking worked fine. But the next instruction (./configure) seems to fail. I believe I am in the correct directory (vmware-player-distrib), but the message received when I key in ./configure is:
bash: ./configure: No such file or directory
I think it has something to do with my SUSE 9.1 install. My guess is that I do not have a command called configure.
A Well, configure is a script included with many source code tarballs - the './' refers to the current directory, so you are running (or trying to run in this case) a program from the unpacked tarball, not a command installed on your system. The majority of Linux open source programs use this to check your system for any dependencies the program needs and to set things up ready for compilation and installation. The reason why it doesn't work in your case is that VMware Player is a precompiled binary program, with a different installation method. The commands you need to information specific to individual run after unpacking the tarball are
cd vmware-player-distrib ./vmware-install.pl
You may need a C compiler and your kernel source installed for VMware Player to configure itself after installation, because it needs to install a module to match your kernel, and it will compile one for you if there is not a pre-built module that suits your system. You can install these from Yast. The packages you need are gcc and kernel-source.