openSUSE 13.1; VMware Workstation 9+ "Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to"

If your running VMware Workstation 9 and above and you use both existing and new VMs you can possibly get a return of "Unable to change virtual machine power state: Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to" error.

This does not happen with everyone, but the problem seems to come from the Nvidia drivers. At least as far as I can tell thus far. I have not been able to debug further because this problem is not happening to me. If you have this problem and your running the Nvidia 331.20 drivers then you will want to do the following.

1) Download the Nvidia 325.15 driver from here http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-325.15-driver.html

Create a custom patched Nvidia driver.

2) Download the patch below for the latest kernel in openSUSE 13.1 which is 3.11+
http://cvs.rpmfusion.org/viewvc/*checkout*/rpms/nvidia-kmod/devel/kernel_v3.11.patch?revision=1.1&root=nonfree

save as kernel_v3.11.patch

3) Execute the following to create the custom patched Nvidia installer.

# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-325.15.run --apply-patch kernel_v3.11.patch

4) You will get a file output NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-325.15-custom.run
5) You can now install this custom Nvidia driver which should fix your VMware Workstation problem.

Enjoy!

Running Webex on openSUSE 13.1 64-bit

If your running openSUSE 13.1 and you use Webex on a regular basis for home/work/other you have probably noticed that it does not execute properly and you can't get some of the features to work on it. Well look no further. Thanks to my colleague dvosburg you can run the below command on your openSUSE 13.1 and it will install the necessary packages and its dependencies that are required for a good Webex experience.

zypper in libpango-1_0-0-32bit \
libpangomm-1_4-1-32bit \
libpangox-1_0-0-32bit \
libgtk-2_0-0-32bit \
libgtk-3-0-32bit \
libglib-2_0-0-32bit \
libXau6-32bit \
libXmu6-32bit \
libxcb1-32bit_64 \
libXext6-32bit 

Enjoy!