What if you ran a Linux distro with a 2.6.18-24 kernel on your Salix system using KVM, Xen, VB, QEMU, etc. Then inside the VM, install VMWare Player 2.5.5?

I know VMWare Player inside of another VMWare product doesn't work because Player performs checks to make sure it's running on bare metal. But ...

Well I give up. Tried VirtualBox, which has a very good and well-polished user interface, but performance still sucked. I suspect VirtualBox wants a CPU with virtualization extensions.

I also tried qemu + kqemu which was faster than qemu alone, but still not fast enough to be useful.

So, I'm ...

Shador, thanks for the tip. Didn't work, but I appreciate the help. :)

Gapan, I agree. Doing some (more) Googling, it looks like VMware Player has issues with many other distros. It seems that after a certain kernel revision, the headers changed in a way that VMWare can't parse them any more. So ...

root[linux]# ls /var/log/packages/kernel-*
/var/log/packages/kernel-firmware-2.6.33.4-noarch-1
/var/log/packages/kernel-headers-2.6.33.4_smp-x86-1
/var/log/packages/kernel-huge-smp-2.6.33.4_smp-i686-1
/var/log/packages/kernel-modules-smp-2.6.33.4_smp-i686-1
/var/log/packages/kernel-source-2.6.33.4 ...

Longtime Slackware user, new Salix user.

Trying to run VMWare Player 2.5 (newer versions of Player require a CPU my PC doesn't have). It installed OK but when I run it, it asks for the location of the kernel headers. Using Gslapt, I installed the kernel-source and kernel-headers per the Salix wiki ...