Re: [gentoo-desktop] VMware Workstation 6.0?

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 18:37 +0000, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Feb 2007 13:14:01 -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
>
> > > Gentoo don't distribute it, they only distribute a bash script and a
> > > couple of patches. The rest comes from VMware. Distributing VMware
> > > isn't really an issue anyway, I have distributed many tens of
> > > thousands of copies, all within VMware's licence terms.
> >
> > Actually, we do distribute it.  We mirror the VMware Workstation
> > tarballs, which is entirely within the license.
>
> Fair point, I suppose what I was trying to say is that you don't
> distribute a Gentoo VMware package, as other distros would have to. Even
> if the licence didn't permit mirroring, you'd still have the builds in
> portage, but with fetch restriction (I take it the beta ebuilds are fetch
> restricted).

Correct on both counts.

To be honest, we're one of the few distributions that can have any
VMware packages in our repository.  This because we're source-based, of
course.  That's not saying that a package couldn't be created for other
distributions, but it would be a mix of binary and source-based
installs, such as a RPM that installed VMware Workstation, then ran
vmware-config.pl afterwards to get the kernel modules.

One of my future goals for everything VMware is to remove the need to
run vmware-config*.pl for them and replacing that code with ebuild code.
In other words, you might be configuring your VMware based on USE flags
and emerge, rather then using vmware-config*.pl after installing.  This
will also mean you'll only ever need to update vmware-modules on a
kernel recompile.  Running vmware-config*.pl will no longer be
necessary.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation