I had just read an article regarding the current state of Broadcom and the VMware saga. It seemed like a good topic for the May 2024 talk, as the regular cadre uses VMware products in their professional life, and some in their personal life. The recent changes in everything VMware related had left all of us in a somewhat uncertain about the future frame of mind.
Needless to say, when I saw the announcement that VMware Workstation Pro (and Fusion Pro) would be free for personal use or for an annual subscription, I thought this might be of interest to the group. I had not counted on the rather entertaining discussion I read in The Worst Website In The Entire World. So after starting to read the article, I thought it would be more intereesting to try it out in a group setting, with little expectation of success.
Little did I realize that it would be as “entertaining” as it was. After a lot of messing around with the instructions (they are not all that easy to follow), I did end up with a linux copy and a MacOS copy. I do not have a Windows mased system to try it on, but I might just see about that, just to see if the experience is the same across the board. I tried the Linux one on FedoraCore39, but it failed to install - specifically the necessary kernel modules. Apparently that is such a “well known” thing that there is a dedicated github project that has modified modules to use for the installation. Apparently if you are not Ubuntu or RHEL, it does not install cleanly. I have not tried either yet, but I might do so if I feel like it.
I also tried the MacOS version after the talk. It installs cleanly and runs, but it only runs ARM binaries on my M1 mini, so that was disappointing, but not terribly unexpected. I guess I can try some ARM based distros on it, but that might be a while, as I have no reason to at this time.
