Ubuntu – How to uninstall VMware-Player

It is likely that the installer is trying to execute a binary in the /tmp folder.

It is probable that whatever partition you have your /tmp folder in, it is configured in /etc/fstab to be "noexec". This means that no binaries are allowed to be executed on that partition.

My advice is to move /tmp to its own partition that has "exec" rights in your fstab line options.

Alternatively, temporarily change "noexec" to "exec" in fstab - install vmware and then switch it back again.

The real source of the problem: VMware Player stores its Library of the used machines in ~/.recently-used.xbel. But GTK3 changed the location of this file to ~/.local/share/. And ~/.recently-used.xbel is cleared on the regular basis, so the list of machines becomes empty. (Some insight can be found here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1714765 and here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+3.0/+bug/1007336).

As we cannot change the behavior of VMware, we can use the workaround. Use the wrapper script to run VMware Player:

#!/bin/bash

cp ~/.vmware/.recently-used.xbel ~
/usr/bin/vmplayer
sleep 5
mv ~/.recently-used.xbel ~/.vmware/

Save it somewhere in your home folder, make it executable and change the launcher which starts your VMware Player to run this script instead. It will store the list of your machines till the next launch of VMware. It was tested with Ubuntu 12.04.1 and VMware Player 5.0.0.

BTW: The answer which got the bounty is wrong. Running VMware Player with superuser privilege won't help you to save the Library. Moreover, it's definitely bad advice to use sudo in this case.