Setting up VMWare in Distrobox
Hi! Big apologies but I posted this in the containers thread totally missing rule #2 there. I deleted that post and am posting here instead.
So I’ve been trying to give this a go. I installed a Debian distrobox. How far I got:
When I install and launch VMware, it needs to compile dependencies. It chokes on missing header files
When I try to check on the distrobox it looks like it’s looking for baste header files. I read (hopefully this didn’t mess something up) that I should install headers in the host system using:
sudo rpm-ostree install kernel-headers-$(uname-r)
It does some stuff
“rom-md repo ‘charm’ (cached); generated: 2025-09-30T21:22:04Z solvable: 781” etc etc
A bunch of similar msgs around various repos
Then chokes on:
error: Packages not found: kernel-headers-6.16.4-115-bazzite.fc42.x86_64
At this point I’m stumped. How would one get header files installed into a distrobox to complete the installation where it needs to do a compile?
THANK you in advance! 🙏
2 Replies
vmware isnt supported as it requires kernel modules we cannot redistribute and they have to be included at build time
if you just need virtualization we have
ujust setup-virtualization to setup virt-manager and qemuAwww. Thanks for helping.
Guess I have to convert my VMware image to qemu format