2008 October, 2nd
This document is now largely REDUNDANT. Please save yourself the trouble and get a recent version of your VMware product. For example... VMware Server 2 does come with a 64bit compatible firefox plugin that runs fine under Fedora 9 WITHOUT ANY TWEAKING.
If you have trouble with the VMware Server 2.x plugin, then have a look at this document: Web Access
This document discusses the VMware browser plugin as is used in the VMware Server 1.x / VMware ESX 3.0.x products.
On fedora 7 and fedora 8 you'll have problems trying to get the standard i686 32 bits firefox working with the MKS plugin.
If you are using a 64 bits version of your OS, the problem gets worse as even in 2008 not all standard firefox browser plugins are available as 64 bits. An example is our MKS plugin. If you are on 32 bits, just skip the next paragraph.
If you want to better understand how the 64 bit problem is addressed when using libraries, then have a look here http://www.redhat.com/magazine/009jul05/features/multilib/
Go get the i686 version of firefox from
http://www.getfirefox.com and download it to your home folder.
then in your home folder, unzip the application
tar -xvzf firefox-xxxx.tar.gz
which will create a "firefox" folder in your homefolder.
cd ~/firefox
Try starting firefox now with:
./firefox
(The . in front is important or it starts the 64 bits version!)
It's likely that it doesn't work yet.
An possible error is:
./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libaries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared file: No such file or directory
The reason for this is that we are missing a library
libstdc++.so.5
Fedora already uses a newer one so you need a compatibility shared object.
You can download that one by running:
yum install compat-libstdc++-33
There's a chance that it doesn't get the 32 bits version of the library (it doesn't if you use pirut). Without that you still get an error, so make sure that this isn't biting you.
From now on you should be able to install 32 bits plugins (not only MKS, but also java and flash, although i believe adobe had a 64 bits version now too)
When i tried installing the MKS plugin it kept giving me errors, setup canceled error -227.
Running this from the command line so that i could see error details didn't help in this case.
So i went on and used a workaround that worked in the past. You probably do NOT have to do this, it was my extra step in order to find the missing library. I installed seamonkey (formerly known as the mozilla suite) as it often is easier to get it working in there as in firefox. After installing seamonkey in my home folder, the following errors showed up when running from the command line while trying to install the plugin.
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "gnomebreakpad": libgnomebreakpad.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /home/wil/.mozilla/plugins/libmks.so (libexpat.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
This is what we needed to know, the libexpat shared object that is installed is newer and we need to install a compatible one.
yum install compat-expat1
After this, the MKS plugin works in seamonkey as well as firefox. You might have to restart firefox in order to get it to work.
The gnomebreakpad error doesn't appear to be relevant for our plugin.
The problem on Ubuntu 8.04 is similar to when using fedora in regards with libexpat. Except now we don't have a compatible package to install. In order to resolve that I've resorted to creating a symbolic link to the newer libexpat version and that seems to work just fine.
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1 /usr/lib/libexpat.so.0
Enter your password and refresh your browser.
As some of you may know, there is a special plugin dedicated to supporting 32bits plugins under 64 bits applications. When I tried to use it... it didn't work. So unless I did something wrong, it is not supported.
FWIW, here's the info I used:
A Linux.com article about NSPluginwrapper
and this is what I get when installing it and trying to configure the plugins.
# ./npconfig -i /home/<username>/.mozilla/plugins/remotemks
nspluginwrapper: /home/<username>/.mozilla/plugins/remotemks is not a valid NPAPI plugin
# ./npconfig -i /home/<username>/.mozilla/plugins/viewer
nspluginwrapper: /home/<username>/.mozilla/plugins/viewer is not a valid NPAPI plugin
# ./npconfig -i /home/<username>/.mozilla/plugins/libmks.so
My conclusion is that it won't work this way, too bad.
So you'll have to use the 32 bits firefox on a 64 bits OS for now if you have a need for the MKS plugin to control your Virtual Infrastructure hosts.
Firefox 3.0.1, Ubuntu 8.04, 2.6.24-19-generic
Suggested tip does not seem to work, /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1 is actually already a symlink to `libexpat.so.1.5.2', is that why, I wonder?
Hi,
Sorry for the late reply, but I was tad busy. Just had taken a look at it on my ubuntu machine and it appears that the culprit here is Firefox 3.0.1. The plugin appears to be hardwired against a max install version of 3.0.0.x. Usually with firefox plugins one can get around that by editing the install.rdf file of the plugin itself. So I had a quick stab at it by opening the following file in my home path:
~/.mozilla/firefox/<random string>.default/extensions/VMwareVMRC@vmware.com/install.rdf
then I took the string:
<em:maxVersion>3.0.0.*</em:maxVersion>
and changed it into:
<em:maxVersion>3.0.1.*</em:maxVersion>
The plugin now shows up in my plugins, but I still get incompatible plugin
So it looks like we need to wait for an update from VMware for ubuntu...
--
Wil
Here's a link to a thread with more background on the firefox 3.0.1. topic.
In the newsflash it says "VMware Server 2 does come with a 64bit compatible firefox plugin". Can you say exactly where libmks.so should be in the VMWare server x86_64 download because I cannot find it. I have recently switched to 64 bit Linux and would like to obtain and manually install the 64 bit plugin. Only the 32 bit plugin is installed from Firefox itself. Thanks.
Hi, You would be looking for a xpi file.
It can be found here:
/usr/lib/vmware/webAccess/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.16/webapps/ui/plugin/vmware-vmrc-linux-x64.xpi
--
Wil
_____________________________________________________
VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com
Hi I think I need the 64 bit version of the "VMWare Remote MKS Plugin" and not the "VMWare Remote Console Plug-in". The xpi file installed for 32 bit is "vmware-mks-linux-ff3.xpi" and downloaded from the server machine itself. Trouble is this causes a "wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32".
I still get the same console screen message after installing "vmware-vmrc-linux-x64.xpi".
"VMware Remote MKS Plugin not running." ...
Thanks
Should have added I'm using Lab Manager