I'm currently using an up-to-date Fedora 27 system, and I have download the VMWare Player .bundle file. Running it results in a successful installation, but the problem arises when I open the VMWare app. It tells me that it needs to install and load kernel modules for VMWare to load. At this dialog, I press the "Install" button. However, it then says that it failed to run "vmware-modconfig" because it was "Unable to copy Xauthorization." I do not appear to have an .Xauthority file in my home directory. I was able to manually create an .Xauthority file by following the steps in this question's answer by ton, and now VMWare successfully asks for my password. Once I enter it in though, the dialog disappears and nothing happens. I might as well use VirtualBox at this point. Can anyone help solve this issue?
1 Answers
I don't know Fedora 27, but if you're running the Gnome desktop on Fedora 27, it seems that it defaults to the Wayland display server protocol. As described here in detail, it's not so easy to elevate the rights of graphical applications under Wayland as it was under Xorg. All detail can be found in that discussion, here is what worked for me under Ubuntu 18.04 running a Wayland session:
xhost si:localuser:root
sudo -H vmplayer
vmplayer now starts and automatically applies the kernel updates needed. Do not continue to run vmplayer like this! It's always a bad idea to have applications running with root rights for longer than needed. Also, it's a good idea to disallow graphical applications with root rights again afterwards, so the next steps are:
<end vmplayer>
xhost -si:localuser:root
After this, you can start vmplayer as a normal user. You will have to repeat these steps whenever vmware needs to recompile / -install kernel modules, of course.
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