Update on Fedora 18 on VMWare Fusion 5.0.3

Everything now works.

The quick version is:

• Create a new Fedora 18 VM
• Do not use “Easy install”
• Disable 3D acceleration in the VM settings (Command-E) prior to starting the install, otherwise you get a spinning idle cursor and no action upon first boot
• Install as you see fit. I use a 64 bit F18, 4 GB of RAM (my Mac has 16 GB of RAM), 100 GB partition, and 4 virtual processors. YMMV. General rule of thumb is that 1 GB is plenty for a casual Gnome desktop, but if you’re using it for software development like me, then the more the better.
• Once installed, update all software using

sudo yum update

• and then reboot.
• This gets you to kernel 3.8.4-202.fc18.x86_64 at the time of writing. This is currently incompatible with VMware tools 9.2.2-893683, but there are known patches (see below) until a VMWare Tools update comes along.
• Let’s install the build tool chain needed to complete VMware Tool installation

sudo yum install patch kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc make

• Reboot just to make sure we’re all good
• Click “Install VMware Tools”
• Unzip the tar ball to ~/Downloads/vmware-tools-distrib/
• Visit this page http://erikbryantology.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/patching-vmware-tools-in-fedora-18.html
• Download the vmware9.k3.8rc4.patch and vmware9.compat_mm.patch patches, and if you feel like you’re not a patch wizard, the shell scripts that apply those patches, too. 
• Follow the directions in the above page to patch the source to the VMCI and HGFS file system sharing modules
• Now build the patched VMware tools

 sudo ./vmware-install.pl

• There should be no compilation ERRORS (there will be a couple of warnings, particularly for 64 bit architectures)
• Reboot
• Test drag and drop file sharing, cut n paste, screen resizing, shared folders, and printing to a MacOS X printer.
• If it’s all good, shutdown the VM
• Go to Settings for the VM (Command-E)
• In Display, re-enable 3D acceleration
• Start up the VM

At this point, you should have access to accelerated 3D within the VM and all VMWare Toolbox features.