Solution to VMware Workstation fails with Linux kernel 3.5.x

[daxm]

First I must thank the Linux Mint chat group as they were the ones to finally help me get this solved! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Okay, now to the topic at hand.

So, VMware Workstation 9 partially installs but cannot compile its modules. Thus it doesn't work. As of right now the only solution I've found is to install a more modern kernel. (There is a patch out there that works for Fedora users but since I'm on Linux Mint 14 running Mate that patch didn't work for me.)

I used the following URL as my basis for the followin instructions: http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php? ... new_kernel

Note: /media/daxm/backup/kernel is a directory on an external USB HDD I have. This could be any directory and it is suggested that you DON'T use /usr/src.
Note: I appended "-thinkpad-w520-4284-cv4" to my kernel since it is so specific to my laptop. Change this to whatever you'd like.

1. Have proper software installed
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential fakeroot kernel-package ncurses-dev libncurses5-dev module-assistant git-core

2. GIT Latest Kernel
cd /media/daxm/backup/kernel
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kern ... stable.git linux-stable

3. Configure the kernel
cd linux-stable/
make mrproper
make localmodconfig

5. Time to compile
make-kpkg clean
CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=`getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN` fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-thinkpad-w520-4284-cv4 kernel_image kernel_headers --uc --us

6. Install
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

7. Reboot to new kernel then:
sudo reboot

cd /lib/modules/$(uname -r)
sudo rm build
sudo rm source
sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r) build
sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r) source
sudo m-a update

8. Fix missing version.h file.
sudo cp /usr/include/linux/version.h /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/.
sudo cp /usr/include/linux/version.h /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/linux/.

After doing these steps VMware would run and I was also able to upgrade to version 9.0.1! Yeah!

I hope this helps. Enjoy.