VMWare Workstation Player does not run on Ubuntu 15.10


Recently I upgraded my Ubuntu to 15.10 Wily Werewolf. One problem I had  was that  VMWare Workstation Player 12 did not run normally. Running from Unity and terminal would result the same. Strange, it just exited with no clue: no window, no error messages, no nothing. At first I thought this was caused by the newly released version, so I removed version 12 and installed version 7. Sadly the problem persisted.

After a quick search on the net, the problem may be caused by VMWare could not use default libglibmm. To fix that, we need to make a new environment variable:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/vmware/lib/libglibmm-2.4.so.1/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

At first, I put that line in a bash file named ldlib.sh inside /etc/profile.d. Indeed this solved this issue. However, it affected other apps, such as GNOME System Monitor. Now it did not want to run. Ofcourse I want all my apps to run properly! So, I need to localize the solution only for VMWare Player. It turned out that vmplayer is a regular bash file, so the solution became easy: delete /etc/profile.d/ldlib.sh, and then paste the above line directly inside /usr/bin/vmplayer.

Now vmplayer can run normally.


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