VMWare updates their package to no longer need patching on Fedora

I was setting up one of my servers to be a workstation for my wife, and had to bring in some video drivers. The latest version of the drivers referenced a new kernel, and of course I have not been updating the kernel because on this machine I also run VMWare's free server instance. VMWare requires that their software be linked against the latest kernel development kit so updating the kernel all the time requires re-linking the software, so I use the "exclude=kernel-*" line in /etc/yum.conf to not automatically update the kernel each time I do other updates.

So I updated the kernel - version 2.6.25.4-10.fc8-i686 - and rebooted.

Then I went to re-link the VMWare software and it wouldn't link :(

I use the "vmware-any-any" patches - version 116 being the latest from http://www.miscreant.org/files/rpms/ - but in this case the compile failed and nothing I did would bring it back to working status.

So I put the incantation "vmware-any-any 2.6.25.4-10.fc8-i686" into Google and came up with a single hit - a French language blog entry at forums.fedora-fr.org which Google kindly offered to translate for me

It turns out I would have saved myself a whole mess of trouble if I'd kept up with the updates from VMWare - seems their latest version, 1.0.6, no longer needs the patches. Thank you REMI

I downloaded the Linux server file from www.vmware.com and the install went without a hitch.