Posted by After my last linux kernel update, vmware-player refused to start. Usually I got the “missing module, do you want to install them” dialog. Instead, I got a dialog to choose the kernel sources, which failed.
After doing some research I got to this post from 2010.
So I unpacked the vmnet and tried to compile it. This step produced the following message.
ERROR: Kernel configuration is invalid.
include/generated/autoconf.h or include/config/auto.conf are missing.
Run 'make oldconfig && make prepare' on kernel src to fix it.
A short check on /usr/src/linux-headers-5.8.0-53-generic/include/generated revealed, that there had there is no autoconf.h
cd /usr/src/linux-headers-5.8.0-53-generic make oldconfig && make prepare ls /usr/src/linux-headers-5.8.0-53-generic/include/generated/*
And the autoconf.h is now there.
The vmnet module then compiled successfully. And starting the vmware player again opened the install dialog.