I was installing VMware Player 5.0.2 onto my Linux laptop that runs Fedora Core 18. The installation works perfectly, and the first time you click on VMplayer, it starts to install. I would get  a error message “C header files matching your running kernel were not found. Refer to your distribution’s documentation for installation instructions”.

I checked that I had the right stuff installed by doing a ” yum list installed kernel* “. I had kernel, kernel-headers and kernel-devel. I even tried telling the installation where the kernel files were. It was not until I looked at the log files in /tmp/vmware that what I was missing was gcc.

So, if you see vmware player error message “C header files matching your running kernel were not found. Refer to your distribution’s documentation for installation instructions”, check to make sure you have gcc installed.