Introduction
Hi all,this post explains how to have debian 7.1 working with vmware player with a full 3D video acceleration (= no fallback mode).
I'm not about to explain here how to install debian 7.1 in vmware (maybe I'll write another post), so let's start with:
- debian installed in vmware
- vmware tools not installed yet
In this situation debian goes to fallback mode even if the 3D video acceleration has been enabled in vmware player: the exciting gnome 3 experience is not joined ... :(
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| gnome 3 in fallback mode |
This happens because the video driver vmwgfx in debian 7.1 and used by vmware has not been compiled with 3D acceleration enabled (see /var/log/Xorg.0.log file).
So I'm going to show the following things:
- install vmware tools
- compile and install vmwgfx driver with 3D acceleration enabled
Install vmware tools
Here following are the instructions how to install vmware tools in debian that mainly allow:- text and files copy/paste from the host machine and debian and viceversa: it's also possible to copy a file from the host machine to the debian guest simply dragging it!!
- to have shared folders between the host machine and the debian guest (so common files are kept in one single place ...)
- become root user with the shell command su (followed by the root password)
- install the compiler and the linux headers with the command apt-get install binutils gcc make linux-headers-$(uname -r)
- on the vmware player: Player --> Manage --> Install VMware Tools: in debian the /dev/cdrom0 will be mounted automatically
- copy and unzip the VMwareTools-9.6.0-1294478.tar.gz file to /root with the following commands:
cp /media/cdrom0/VMwareTools-9.6.0-1294478.tar.gz /root
cd /root
gzip -d VMwareTools-9.6.0-1294478.tar.gz
tar -xvf VMwareTools-9.6.0-1294478.tar
- we'll have vmware-tools-distrib directory under /root: launch ./vmware-install.pl and respond with the default answers (showed between [])
- at the end vmware tools are installed: reboot your virtual machine with the reboot command
Compile and install vmwgfx driver with 3D acceleration enabled
After restarted, the debian virtual machine of course goes again in fallback mode: to avoid this we need to compile and install drm, mesa and xf86-video-vmware video drivers, with the 3D acceleration enabled.The following procedure has been taken here and modified with the comments in the same link.
- become root user with the shell command su (followed by the root password)
- install the following packages with the commands (it takes a little while, please wait ...):
apt-get install autoconf libtool xutils-dev xorg-dev flex bison libx11-xcb-dev libxcb-glx0-dev g++ git
apt-get install libxcb-dri2-0-dev libxcb-xfixes0 libxcb-xfixes0-dev llvm libxml2 libxml2-dev python-libxml2 build-essential
apt-get build-dep mesa
- compile and install drm, mesa and xf86-video-vmware video drivers, with the 3D acceleration enabled. To do this, first create a directory (I used vmware-3d) under /root:
cd vmware-3d
Then get the drm, mesa and xf86-video-vmware video drivers source code by git (this takes a little longer than before ...please be patient):
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-vmware
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/drm
So we'll have the drm, mesa and xf86-video-vmware directories under vmware-3d to compile the new drivers:
- building and installing drm:
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-vmwgfx-experimental-api
make
make install
cd ..
- building and installing mesa:
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-xa --with-gallium-drivers=svga --with-dri-drivers= --disable-egl --disable-glu --disable-glw
make
make install
cd ..
- building and installing xf86-video-vmware:
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install
That's all folks, reboot the debian machine and enjoy the new gnome 3 experience ...:
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| debian 7.1 virtualized in vmware 6.0 |
