Standardizing on one VM platform has made my life so much easier. I’ve played with a number of them x11 and I’ve settled on VMWare. Currently, I have an Ubuntu Server running VMWare in my basement and I have a number of client machines that have VMWare client software running as well. Recently I’ve noticed a deficiency when I move my main computing platform to Mac OSX — there is no VMWare Server Console software.

This software is very valuable if you are running multiple VMs on a VMware server. Instead of configuring a remote control or SSH server on each client VM, you can control the VMs via the VMWare Server Console. When my main computing platform was Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon, this was a no-brainer. The software is bundled with the Linux client package. Running Gusty Gibbon on my primary PC was amazing because I could not only control another VMWare Server, the workstation had multiple client OS’s installed locally so I could have a dozen machines running on two physical pieces of hardware. But then I made the switch….


Fortunately, Tao of Mac has an excellent article on getting the VMWare Server Console to work on OS X. In a nutshell, you’ll need to use forward your X11 calls from the machine that has VMWare Server Console installed to your machine via the X11.app.

Before following the steps above, you’ll have to get hold of the VMWare Server Console software. Select the VMWare Server Linux client package at the end of the page. If you need any help installing the package see this VMWare online library article.

Since I installed VMWare Server console on my non-gui Ubuntu server I couldn’t really test my installation. Thus after my install, I eagerly executed the steps in the Tao of Mac article and I got the dreaded error:

/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console:
/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0:
no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)

To be honest, I think that VMWare throws this message up every time it encounters a configuration issue. It’s not very specific — or rather it’s misleading. I had investigated so many different possibilities to find out that I had two issues:

  1. The ownership of my .vmware directory and preferences file contain in it were own by root as opposed to my user account.
  2. I need to update my OS headers

The first item was easy enough by executing chown (user:group) on the directory to make it ‘mine’. The second is just as straight forward — Here are the commands:

Update server apt-get cache:

sudo apt-get update

Get latest headers:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

After completing the above, I simply executed the steps in the Tao Of Mac link and I had a working VMWare Server console running on my Mac.

-JT