Building vmware-tools in your Oracle Linux UEK3 VM

This is a quick writeup of an oddity I found while trying to install the vmwareware tools in an Oracle Linux host with the UEK3 kernel enabled (which is by default).

This is what is encountered during the vmware tools installation dialog when running vmwaretools.pl:

Searching for a valid kernel header path...
The path "" is not a valid path to the 3.8.13-16.2.2.el6uek.x86_64 kernel 
headers.
Would you like to change it? [yes]

The building of vmware tools fail because the kernel headers can not be found: the installer doesn’t see the kernel headers, whilst you probably installed it (it’s the kernel-uek-devel package belonging to the running kernel).

The reason is vmwaretools.pl is searching for /usr/src/kernel/KERNELVERSION/include/linux/version.h. And that file is not there anymore. The workaround is to symlink the version.h file from /usr/src/kernels/KERNELVERSION/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h to its old place:

ln -s /usr/src/kernels/3.8.13-16.2.2.el6uek.x86_64/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /usr/src/kernels/3.8.13-16.2.2.el6uek.x86_64/include/linux/version.h

• kernel
• linux
• UEK
• UEK3
• vmware
• vmware-tools