VMWare and Precise

After the migration to Precise Pangolin (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS), I needed VMWare Player. I do have a MS Windows Server 2000 image, and attempts to make that available under VirtualBox resulted in a non-performing image.
So, the latest and the greatest VMWare Player (4.0.4) was installed.

Alas, it complains about services it needs to recompile, and that fails.
In detail, the virtual net services fail to compile.

Luckily, I found this blog entry.
Basically, download the patch mentioned, and execute

sudo su -
tar xvf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar -C /tmp
cd /tmp
cp /home/frank/Downloads/vmnet.diffs /tmp
patch -p0 < vmnet.diffs
cp /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar.org
tar cvf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar vmnet-only

Now, retry the compile by opening VMWare Player.

Even the networking part will now succeed and VMWare will present you a license agreement. You can now use VMWare player 4.0.4 on Precise Pangolin (12.04 LTS)